At aleno there are not only presents at Christmas, but throughout the year: The development team released a total of 12 new integrations with other software systems and 6 new functions last year.
All new functions and integrations at a glance
All these integrations were developed at the request of customers. The benefit: You can use them to improve processes, increase turnover and offer guests a much better service.
For example, instead of checking guests in and out of the POS system and the reservation system, with POS integration this only needs to be done in one of the two systems. In addition, reservation/contact data is synchronised with order data. This makes it easy to identify high-turnover guests at the time of reservation and to precisely match their tastes with the menu and drink suggestions.
F&B meets Rooms: PMS and Restaurant Management go together
The integrations to the PMS systems Protel, Mews and Micros Fidelio have made the hotel industry in particular sit up and take notice. The example of the 5-star hotel Suvretta House and the Protel integration has shown what an enormous advantage the interaction of the two software systems brings.
F&B managers of the hotel restaurants and the front office staff no longer have to print out lists and compare information on guests. Instead, this is now done completely automatically in the PMS and the restaurant management system aleno. And at the same time, external restaurant visitors are also automatically transferred to the hotel's CRM. For a better guest experience and 360-degree customer data.
More functions, better user experience and more precise guest information
In addition to the various integrations, aleno customers can also use several new functions. For example, alenoPay enables restaurants to sell menus or tickets at the same time as the online reservation. On top No-show fees can be charged if guests do not cancel their reservation within an individually adjustable lead time. For predictable and secure sales.
In doing so, aleno customers can enter, sell and invoice their products/menus/tickets in the backend without any effort. And all this with the invoicing and payment service they want.
Newly added are also extended settings for the length of stay of guests. These can be set not only per shift as before, but even per table. This makes restaurant operators even more flexible in terms of double and triple seating. On top of that, there are additional fields for guest information. Service staff can choose which fields should be used for which additional information. For a faster overview and efficient filtering.
On top of that, the performance of the aleno system has been further improved. We migrated our infrastructure resulting in 20% higher performance across all functionalities. Also we improved the customer search, making it more than up to 30 times faster and improved the suggestions quality at once. And while serving more than twice as much reservations than the last year the system is as stable as the Gotthard in Switzerland.
AI-supported restaurant management and business intelligence
Another new feature is the AI-supported table allocation. This helps to optimise the restaurant's capacity utilisation and makes life much easier for the service staff. The algorithm learns from the historical data. Suggestions for auto-placements can also be overwritten if necessary. This information trains the system further. aleno customers can decide for themselves whether they want to use automatic table allocation or continue to rely on their personal experience.
A new module that simplifies restaurant operations enormously is the Business Intelligence. It enables individual and meaningful reports on reservations, occupancy, turnover and many other areas - even across several establishments.
Numerous other integrations in the pipeline
It gets even better. Because we have raised the aleno interface (Application Programming Interface, API for short) to a completely new level. An API enables the exchange of data with other relevant software systems. Newly, aleno uses GraphQL.
GraphQL is a data query language developed by Facebook. It is mainly used in the development of APIs (application programming interfaces) to deliver data from a server to an application.
Unlike traditional APIs, which require the structure and content of the data sent to the application to be pre-specified, GraphQL allows developers to query exactly the data they need and gives them the ability to influence the structure of the responses. This improves application performance and shortens development time.
Overview of all new functions and integrations in 2022
Additional and extended functionalities
- AI-based table asignment for even more optimal capacity utilisation
- alenoPay (no-fees, advance bookings and ticket sales)
- Dwell time restriction also for individual tables
- Business intelligence and reporting module
- Additional fields for specific guest information
POS
- Lightspeed
- Hypersoft
- GMS
Hotel PMS
- Protel
- Mews
- Micros Fidelio
Review Management
- Respondelligent
Payment Gateway
- Datatrans
- Wallee (für Adyen, Fiserv, Six Worldline, Nets Concardis, Paypal)
Reservierungs Channels
- Reserve with Google
- Best of Swiss Gastro
- Experience Shop Engadin
- Shop Davos Klosters
All integrations can be found on our Marketplace - incidentally, also a platform that we went live with this year.