Guestwise

When Aden Fraser and I started talking about Guestwise 3 years ago, we believed that we could help hospitality brands generate more revenue. The original website was snazzy, but was deleted a few months later in a 'code clean up'. The second one was less snazzy and focussed on potential products around revenue management, AI, dynamic pricing, real time engagement and more..... while we figured out what Customer's actually wanted to use. Three years down the track.... how is it going? Well, we won a major enterprise customer early doors, lets call them Vitlers and Cutlers, who have over 1,500 restaurants and bars. They backed our belief that we could build an AI SAAS platform that would transform digital marketing, creating real personalisation across channels, integrating with their key systems, and utilising data to drive growth in visits and retention. Is it delivering? Even after cannibalisation (guests who would have converted anyway without our intervention) Guestwise is now delivering over £40 m in year incremental revenue. That's a big number, but we are only just getting started as that number includes 10 existing customers, and we are currently onboarding a range of great new brands. I'm overwhelmed with gratitude to every one of those customers putting their faith in our vision and technology. Our new website launching next week, and is SNAZZY again, and reflects the products that customers are getting the most benefit from. We have a brilliant team, great tech, and a culture that empowers and elevates each person on the team. Start-ups are full of ambiguity, and the need to embrace the unknown and scary. Safe to say, we are very grateful to our restaurant partners and all the people in them who have embraced our kooky ways of working, and relentless push for faster, better, more fun. It's not always easy, but it is definitely rewarding. #startup #hospitalitytech

We're now live with Azzurri Group! 🕺 Since starting out in hospitality tech with One from Me in 2014, and then Flypay/Flyt in 2017, Azzurri have always been on the wish list of potential partners. Well loved brands and sharp digital, tech and ops teams. We’ve been delighted by how forward-thinking, collaborative, and on it they’ve been from day one. ASK Italian, Zizzi, and Coco di Mama are now live with Guestwise, and the Azzurri team made the whole thing a joy to be a part of - they GET it! Switching tech is rarely straightforward (especially across multiple brands and systems), but this rollout was one of the smoothest we’ve seen. Transparent planning, fast decisions, rapid collaboration. Openr and Zonal (Comtrex) were great integration partners, with everyone pulling in one direction under the expert guidance of Bebe Oladipo. Jim Hingston, Azzurri’s Digital & Technology Director, kindly let us share his thoughts: “From first conversation to go-live was easy from our perspective… the tech does exactly what we need. Guestwise moves fast, brings ideas, and builds what we need. It’s like a breath of fresh air.” Plenty more to come. I'm excited about where Azzurri is going next. Big ambitions, clear strategy, good tech stack, and a team that moves with real intent. Proud to be part of their journey, and love seeing them succeed. Here’s to what comes after go-live. Let’s go 🚀

Building a startup feels a lot like assembling a rocket mid-flight... bolts rattling, fuel running low, and parts still untested. When Carey Benn and I first started Guestwise, 'To the Moon 🚀' began as a tongue-in-cheek reference to meme stocks and stonks culture... the kind of humour you cling to when you’re two founders trying to get something off the ground. But over time the joke evolved into a symbol of what we believe in. Not joke valuations or 'pump and dump'. But instead, something that is at the core of our DNA as two founders and part of our Guestwise culture. To us, “To the Moon” means three powerful things: - It's a shared journey. No one builds a rocket alone. Our progress depends on the people beside us: our team, our partners, and our customers. Every launch, every iteration, every small win happens together. - Be bold in your ambition. Carey and I didn’t leave stable jobs to build “just another platform.” We want to challenge the industry and help hospitality operators finally harness data and automation the way ecommerce has for years. - Everyone at Guestwise owns a piece of the rocket. There’s no “mission control” telling us what to do. We build it, fly it, fix it, and learn from every wobble on the way up, fostering true ownership and autonomy. It’s all about aiming high, making a real impact, and knowing that what we’re building actually matters to the people we serve. As we close out 2025, I'm excited to see where this rocket rides in 2026.

If you are a director or head of in Hospitality, I need you to call me! Why? Because Guestwise has game changing tech for revenue growth, and I hate cold calling people :). I love the relationship building, discussing the art of the possible and working with passionate people who want more. I don't enjoy introducing myself to people I don't know, it's scary and uncomfortable, and yet my team expects me to do it anyway. I was on the train to Birmingham to watch the cricket with a close friend who lived with me when I was building my first business in 2006. He watched me hammer the phones, email, and travel the country doing sales. He asked how much cold outreach I am doing for Guestwise. I was a bit embarrassed, as I said 'not a lot'. He gave me some not so gentle grief and asked why. It was a fair question. I've thought a lot about it in the time since, and I guess the honest answer is that I am 47, with a lovely family, good work life balance, great friends, great business, and I don't fancy myself as a carpet salesman. With Aden and the team, we have built one of the UK's leading AI platforms for marketing and sales automation, and I wish that alone was enough to get the phone ringing off the hook. But it's not - hence this post! As soon as I meet people in person, it changes... I'm energised, and want to do everything I can to help that potential customer win, or even just to share what works and what doesn't from insights I have picked up along the way. So do a guy a solid, don't make me look bad to my team, pick up the phone, DM me, tell me you want to work with Guestwise, and get me off the hook! I don't want to have to cold call you, or hammer your inbox, or walk up to you randomly at an industry event and try to sell you something. You folks are the best. 🙏

Deposit and Pre-Auth chasing isn’t complicated, but it is time consuming, and keeping track of hundreds of them across locations is PAINFUL for sales team. So we provided a Guestwise automation to handle it for them directly into and from existing booking systems! Guests submit an enquiry, get sent a payment link, and then the sales team needs to keep track of whether that payment is completed, and follow up if not. It’s a manual process hospitality sales teams know well: a first reminder, a second follow up and then a final warning that tables will be released, with follow up timing based on each venue’s capacity and demand. For peak periods (and days), timing matters. If a table needs to be released when a payment hasn’t been completed within 48 hours of booking, leaving the chase until X days before the booking, means losing the opportunity to resell it. Equally, nobody wants to bombard a guest with reminders. As booking volumes grow towards Christmas, teams are spending hours checking who hasn’t paid, and when they need to be chased again. The Guestwise automation is configured by each brand to follow the same cadence the team would normally use: first chase, second chase, final warning, and the content of each follow up message. Guestwise then triggers the messages at the right time to each guest, and marks the Booking system enquiry as ‘chase 1, chase 2, final chase’ etc. Before each message is sent, Guestwise checks whether the deposit or pre-auth has been paid in the meantime. Which means no more “please ignore this email if you’ve already paid” messages being sent to guests. It’s a fairly simple idea, but during busy periods, that’s a lot of checking, and manual chasing the sales team no longer has to do. Sales teams have way better things to do than check booking by booking whether a payment has been made!

Do you know how guests behave on your website and whether they are new or repeat visitors? We don’t mean the top level stats like what you’ll see in GA for traffic or source etc. The actual individual guest and how they behaved on web, did they go to the kids or offers page, did they check out the menu. Turns out that just like in venue visits: ‘80% of web visitors re only seen once’. Across the 2500 odd venues we work with, between 7% and 25% of guests visiting a webpage have been seen before. The basics are still the same as they always have been, simple booking journey, easy to find information, and appealing brand marketing and content. With the added complexity now that each brand website also needs to be AI readable, have location specific FAQs and have content that matches what is available on third party listing and review sites. Argh. In terms of bookings, around 50 of visitors start a booking journey and 9% complete one. There will be plenty who are coming to check the menu, or directions etc who already have a booking (Hi again, welcome back web visitor!), or who are browsing after being recommended 3 places in AI search/chat. Once the basics are in place, it’s all about using smart features. Abandoned booking follow up emails, countdowns on web banners for offers that are expiring or locations with very few tables left for Friday night, consent capture after the booking is made, and finding out a bit more about each web visitor in terms of who they are and why they are interested. All stuff that is bread and butter for Guestwise customer’s and we are delighted with the results they are getting across the board.