2022 wrap-up at HiJiffy

In our annual wrap-up article, we look back at the key moments and achievements that defined 2022 at HiJiffy. 

Before we kick off, if you have been part of our journey – as a client, partner, investor, industry expert, or one of many kind people that we have connected with in the last 12 months – thank you for your ongoing support! It has been motivating and inspiring to meet people with a shared passion for hospitality and guest communications.

If our paths have not crossed yet, we are hoping this changes next year! Book a demo with our team whenever you are ready to find out more about Guest Communications Hub.

At HiJiffy, we have grown in many ways and will briefly touch upon different activities – follow the links for further reading if you are interested in learning more or get in touch if you have any questions.

Now, let us start with…

The launch of Aplysia OS

In July, we celebrated possibly our biggest announcement yet – the launch of Aplysia OS, the first Guest Communications Operating System. Our proprietary conversational AI behind it has been trained in hospitality and uses powerful techniques, such as machine learning and sentiment analysis, and has the capacity to self-learn. 

Being able to understand emotion, remove friction, boost productivity, and unlock scalability, Aplysia OS aims to elevate the role played by hotel staff by supporting them with streamlining and automating guest communications.

>> Read more about Aplysia OS

Voice assistant

Still before the end of this year, we managed to launch one more development that makes our Guest Communications Hub even more useful for hoteliers – the voice assistant. Currently in Beta testing in a restricted number of hotels, it will soon be made available for all clients upon request.

Powered by Aplysia OS, the voice assistant is capable of handling complex voice communication thanks to advanced Speech-to-Text (STT) and Text-to-Speech (TTS) models. 

With over seven billion voice messages sent daily on WhatsApp alone, we expect our voice assistant to be a powerful tool to reduce the workload for reservation and reception teams. Our conversational AI will be able to automatically answer most voice messages in the same form, which you can see in a demo video below.

>> Read more about the benefits of using a voice assistant in the hospitality industry

>> Learn about the technology behind our voice assistant

Refreshed and improved Console

As a user of our Console streamlining and automating your hotel’s guest communications, you might have noticed how it has been growing from strength to strength. This year, it got a refreshed look with new navigation, a new dashboard page and reports bringing actionable insights to the foreground. 

AI-powered sentiment analysis and conversation prioritisation visual cues empower Console users to navigate through the most important messages more efficiently.

More tech developments

Our Product team shipped nearly 2,000 deliverables this year, and an attempt to briefly summarise all of it would be impossible. We already covered the launch of Aplysia OS and the voice assistant, but there has been a constant stream of new features (e.g. SMS campaigns that boost hotels’ revenue with over 98% open rate), 20+ integrations with all kinds of hotel management systems, UX/UI improvements (e.g. a new booking flow form in Booking Assistant), special projects, and the list goes on…

>> Follow HiJiffy on LinkedIn to stay up-to-date with future developments.

Empowering hoteliers all over the world

HiJiffy’s Guest Communications Hub is now used in over 50 countries, which is more than 25% of all the world’s countries! Our conversational AI “lives” in over 220 cities around the globe, streamlining and automating guest communications. We have strengthened our presence in our key markets, Portugal, Spain, France, and the UK, and if you keep an eye on our job adverts, you may get an idea of which market we aim to expand to in 2023…

In 2022, our unstoppable Customer Success team onboarded over 600 properties of all shapes and sizes, and 43% of our new clients have contracted Virtual Concierge services. 

Our clients reported fantastic results after implementing our conversational AI solutions, for example, reducing incoming calls by 70% while increasing direct bookings and table reservations, or making over €157k in direct bookings.

>> Explore success stories of HiJiffy clients

Awards and recognitions

And it feels fantastic to have the quality of our work recognised externally. In 2022, HiJiffy was named the Best Startup in Portugal at Portugal Trade Awards by Publituris, as well as won the Most Disruptive Guest Experience Technology award by Lux Life. We were also delighted to see our Lead Developer, Andreia Pais, winning the Portuguese Women in Tech Award in the Engineering category. And just as we were drafting this article on the website, HiJiffy was named the Travel Startup of the Year in the Portugal Ventures startups portfolio. 

HiJiffy on tour

Attending industry events always energises our Sales team as we get to make new connections and catch up with our clients, partners and friends. In 2022, the HiJiffy calendar was packed with over 20 major trade shows and events, including our exhibitions at FITUR in Madrid, Bolsa Turismo Lisboa, Hotel 4.0 in Porto, Direct Booking Summit in Berlin, TechnoHotel Forum in Barcelona, Independent Hotel Show in London, as well as Food Hotel Tech and EquipHotel in Paris.

One of the many things we have learned at the trade shows – our Portuguese custard tards, pasteis de nata, are a hit! Visit a HiJiffy booth in 2023 to try them – and, of course, to have a demo of how our AI-powered solutions can take your guest communications to the next level.

The incredible team

In 2022, we welcomed ten people to our team. Our Customer Success team saw a 250% increase in their size! We cannot wait to continue to grow the HiJiffy community in 2023 – look at all the job openings at HiJiffy at the moment; perhaps you or someone you know will be our next best hire.

Last October marked six years of HiJiffy as a company, and we created a special timeline to recap key milestones on that journey. We also celebrated the fifth work anniversary of our very first team member, Andreia, and four other members have been with us for over two years.

Our team continues to work remotely, spread from Madeira to Bordeaux, London to Vidigueira. We come together every quarter to look back – reflecting on what we had achieved in the previous few months – and look ahead – sharing plans with other team members. And, of course, there is a whole lot of happily hanging out together, and getting to know each other better. 

At our quarterlies in 2022, we received a warm welcome from our client hotels: Marriott in Praia d’El Rey, Ohai in Nazaré, Vila Galé in Évora, and Hotel do Mar in Sesimbra. During the reunion in the summer, we visited the official headquarters of HiJiffy in Vidigueira in the scorching heat of 43ºC.

Ready for 2023

We have had a fantastic year at HiJiffy and we already have quite a few exciting projects in the pipeline for next year that we cannot wait to share. In terms of New Year’s resolutions, we are going to stick to the same one we have every year at HiJiffy – to better connect hotels with their guests by developing the most advanced conversational AI for hospitality.

See you in 2023 for more!