2023 wrap-up at HiJiffy

As 2023 is coming to a close, it’s an excellent opportunity to reflect on and appreciate what a fantastic year it’s been at HiJiffy and recap some of our key achievements and memorable moments. 

This year’s dominant theme is growth – in different directions and across various areas. It’s facilitated by a dedicated and passionate team at HiJiffy and accelerated by enthusiastic clients, industry partners, investors, and hospitality experts. Thank you for over seven years of trust, support and collaboration in reimagining guest communications together.

Let’s look at some of the highlights of 2023 at HiJiffy.

Enhancing Guest Communications Hub with GPT-4

HiJiffy’s Product team continuously delivers optimisations and new features every year. One of the defining moments of the Guest Communications Hub development occurred in March of 2023. That’s when our solution was enhanced with generative AI, further decreasing manual work for hotel staff and enabling even more precise and focused answers for travellers and hotel guests. HiJiffy’s proprietary AI, Aplysia, controls generated responses to ensure they are only based on accurate information provided by hotels.

>> Learn more about how our solution uses generative AI

Unveiling new brand identity

In May, we started a new chapter at HiJiffy by unveiling a new brand aligned with the future-oriented innovation at the core of our business. HiJiffy’s in-house Marketing team delivered the complete rebranding. The updated logo and visuals reflect the company’s evolution, and HiJiffy’s new tagline encourages hoteliers to reimagine guest communications with conversational AI. Our Guest Communications Hub empowers them in that quest.

Refreshing the Console

Following the rebranding, the interface of our Guest Communications Hub received a design update and introduced UX optimisations that made navigating the solution even more seamless and intuitive.

Raising €3.8M

In the spring of 2023, HiJiffy announced raising €3.8M in a funding round led by Caixa Capital, joined by Lince Capital and Portugal Ventures, which had already invested in HiJiffy in 2020. In addition to the €2.5M invested by the venture capital companies, €1.3M was granted by the European Commission through the Recovery and Resilience Plan.

Expanding to the DACH market

Alongside the funding round, an expansion to the DACH market (Germany, Austria and Switzerland) was announced. A dedicated German-speaking team joined HiJiffy this year to serve the market’s needs and connect with innovative hoteliers seeking an all-in-one solution for guest communications.

Receiving customer support certifications

Our team’s commitment to continuous improvement and ensuring our clients make the most of the Guest Communications Hub was recognised not once but twice in 2023. In July, HiJiffy was awarded Level II Customer Support certification from Hotel Tech Report, an independent platform evaluating hotel tech solutions. Six months later, our Customer Success and Product teams’ dedication was recognised again, upgrading the certification to Level III. And we’re not planning to stop here!

Sharing insights and educational content

In 2023, we boosted our efforts to share conversational AI knowledge with hoteliers and showcase best practices applied to guest communications. We published two free e-books, several articles on our blog, inspiring case studies of our clients’ success stories, an extensive glossary of hospitality terms, and HiJiffy’s inaugural first-party data report on the most frequent questions hotel guests ask.

Moving to new offices

In June, we moved our Lisbon office to a beautiful space at Heden Santa Apolonia by the Tejo River. It’s the first coworking space in Portugal with the B-Corp certification, which was an important factor when choosing the office, as sustainability is also important to us at HiJiffy. Later in the year, at our final quarterly meeting of 2023, we inaugurated our new headquarters in Vidigueria in the Alentejo region of Portugal – a very special place in the history of HiJiffy.

Touring in Europe

Our Sales team attended nearly 40 industry events and trade shows in Europe in 2023, including:

• FITUR – International Tourism Fair (Madrid)
• Bolsa de Turismo de Lisboa (Lisbon)
• Internationale Tourismus-Börse (Berlin)
• Food Hotel Tech (Paris)
• International Hotel Technology Forum (Vienna)
• Unfold (Amsterdam)
• The Great General Manager Debate (London)
• Hospitality Operator Forum (Paris)
• Tecnohotel (Barcelona)
• Annual Hotel Conference (Manchester)
• ITH Innovation Summit (Madrid)
• IFTM Top Resa (Paris)
• Independent Hotel Show (London)
• Prest’Hôtel (Deauville and Marseille)
• Tourism Innovation Summit (Sevilla)
• World Travel Market (London)
• HOSPACE (London)
• Exp’hotel (Bordeaux)
• IBTM (Barcelona)
• and many more!

Growing our team

It’s been a busy time for our People and Finance team as we’re wrapping up the year with over 40 people at HiJiffy, including new members in every single team. We work remotely from Portugal, Spain, France, Germany and the UK and enjoy a dynamic mix of over ten different nationalities and nine native languages spoken at HiJiffy.

The team got together four times in 2023 for our quarterly in-person reunions in Portugal across Monte Real, Sines, Lisbon, Vidigueira and Beja. You can read more about each of them and learn what it’s like to work at HiJiffy on our Careers blog. For a behind-the-scenes sneak peek, visit the recently launched HiJiffy Instagram account.

>> See the current job opening at HiJiffy

More to come in 2024!

As plans are being laid out for 2024, we’re excited to see what’s on the horizon, and we can’t wait to share it with you in the coming months. There’s one that you can be sure to expect – at HiJiffy, we will continue developing the most advanced and innovative conversational AI for hospitality to further transform guest communications.