Published:
April 4, 2022
A gorgeous property hosting travelers from all over the world, Fairmont Jasper Park Lodge is making the most of the Kipsu & WhatsApp integration to communicate with guests.
Agents of the Central Services and Reservations team, Avery Dixon and Fesida Fernandes, enjoy hospitality for similar reasons: no day is the same.
“Every day is a different day, with different types of guests,” Fernandes said of working with travelers at Fairmont Jasper Park Lodge since 2018.
Dixon, who grew up in Ontario, has been coming to the Banff and Jasper National Park area in the summers since she was young. “I really liked coming here growing up, so I knew I wanted to work here,” she said.
With loosened restrictions worldwide, they’re finally starting to see more and more international guests coming into the property, Dixon said. “There’s definitely different aspects, [working] with people from anywhere,” she said.
Since Fairmont Jasper Park Lodge isn’t just one building, but rather a sprawling resort with heritage log cabins spreading across a vast 700-acre property, visitors felt safer coming to the property when the pandemic was more prevalent.
“We were pretty lucky, we didn’t see too many effects of COVID-19 with layoffs,” Dixon said, mentioning that guests have their own external entrances to rooms and don’t have to share elevators to get from point A to point B. “People felt safer coming here,” she said.
The team uses Kipsu property-wide for contactless hospitality: from the spa to the concierge and front desk, to communicating internally across teams.
“It’s streamlined for the guests, because they’re only texting one number but it’s coming from all these different places,” Dixon said of the hotel texting platform. While separate teams might be managing the same conversation from all across the property, guests can just text one number.
“Guests really like it, they can just send a text and get a text back in a few minutes,” she added. Most people prefer digital messaging in hospitality to calling or being left on hold when making requests, she said.
On the hospitality side, using WhatsApp for hotels gives team members more flexibility when handling guests. “We can text and take a call at the same time,” Fernandes said, which helps with increasing efficiency with leaner teams.
Since all digital channels can be managed from one platform in Kipsu, it doesn’t look any different from the hospitality side to add the WhatsApp hospitality integration.
“It’s more for the guest side, so they have a different option to text us from,” Dixon said. “For us it’s all on the same side, [the guests] wouldn't really know the difference,” she explained of what the platform looks like.
Another feature within the Kipsu platform she expressed enjoying is the competitive rankings with other Kipsu users in the area. “It’s fun to see where we keep up with them and how we’re doing [in comparison],” she said.
The team at Fairmont Jasper Park Lodge has noticed that it seems to be a personal preference for guests to use digital messaging for requests, over in-person trips to the front desk or phone calls.
“Lots of guests prefer to text their requests over,” Dixon said.
Another aspect to consider is that due to the remote location, guests don’t come expecting to be attached to their phones, said Laura-Ann Chong, Public Relations Manager at Fairmont Jasper Park Lodge.
“International travelers don’t always have SIM cards,” she said, which is why a digital messaging channel like WhatsApp that works over wi-fi is so important.
Fairmont Jasper Park Lodge is just one of dozens of properties worldwide using the Kipsu & WhatsApp integration to create elevated experiences for travelers.
Learn more about the Kipsu + WhatsApp integration or schedule a conversation today.
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