The Boutique Hospitality Tech Stack Audit Checklist

Can a guest book any of your venues (rooftop, restaurant, spa, events) without leaving your domain?

If no: If no — every external booking handoff bleeds conversion at the moment of intent. Consolidating booking onto your own infrastructure is one of the highest-ROI moves.

Does your spa booking flow capture a deposit at submission, not at appointment time?

If no: If no — your no-show rate is likely 15–25% and absorbed by your operation. Deposit at submission is the single biggest lever to drop it into single digits.

Can a returning guest be recognized across venues without staff manually flagging them?

If no: If no — your guest record is fragmented across vendors. Cross-venue identity is what makes returning-guest follow-up possible.

Is your event enquiry pipeline a real system (kanban or pipeline view), not a shared spreadsheet?

If no: If no — your sales process is unmeasurable. You can't answer 'how long does an event enquiry take to convert' from a spreadsheet.

Does your booking system enforce cancellation and refund policies automatically?

If no: If no — front-desk staff are doing the math, which means policies get applied inconsistently and refund disputes happen.

Are your booking confirmations branded, with your domain, your design language, and your tone?

If no: If no — every confirmation email is a brand-experience leak. The booking flow is part of the brand, not utility plumbing.

Can you query 'all bookings across all venues this month' in one report, in one place?

If no: If no — your group-level reporting depends on a Monday-morning CSV stitch. That labor compounds.

Does your booking system route payments by region (Stripe in NA, Paystack in West Africa, etc.)?

If no: If no and your venues span regions — you're either losing local conversion or paying cross-border fees you don't have to.

Are reminder emails and SMS sending automatically at 24h and 2h before the appointment?

If no: If no — you're absorbing avoidable no-shows. SMS open rates are around 90%; email is 20–30%. Both should be running.

Is your booking flow mobile-first, with the price visible on first paint and no flicker?

If no: If no — mobile conversion is suffering. First-paint price correctness is a measurable lift on hospitality booking flows.

Does a single login give your GM visibility into all venues' bookings for the day?

If no: If no — your GM logs into 3–5 vendor portals to assemble the day's picture. Unify the admin and you save hours per week per role.

Can per-venue staff see only their venue's data, with row-level security enforced at the database?

If no: If no — data is one bug at the API layer away from leaking. The security boundary belongs in the database, not the application.

Is your admin role model granular enough to give different views to staff, managers, and owners?

If no: If no — staff are seeing more or less than they should. Role granularity is what makes the admin trustable.

Is the admin available on mobile, with usable touch targets for the host stand and the spa front desk?

If no: If no — the admin is a desktop tool in a tablet-and-phone environment. That's a workflow tax.

Does the admin produce group-level dashboards (revenue, occupancy, no-show rate) without manual exports?

If no: If no — your weekly business review is a CSV stitch, not a query. Time to fix that.

Is every venue's Google Business Profile verified and currently owned by an account you control?

If no: If no — verify first. Nothing else compounds against an unverified profile, and account ownership matters when staff turnover happens.

Are you posting to Google Posts at least once a week, every week?

If no: If no — the listing's freshness signal is decaying. Weekly posts are the floor.

Are you responding to every review, positive and negative, within 48 hours?

If no: If no — the negative review speaks unopposed to the next prospective guest. Response strategy matters more than acquisition strategy.

Does your menu page have Restaurant + Menu + LocalBusiness JSON-LD schema rendered server-side?

If no: If no — Google is reading less of your menu than it could. Schema unlocks rich results that look more credible than blue-link-and-snippet.

Are your photo, hours, and attributes fields fully populated, with new photos added monthly?

If no: If no — Google is reading the listing as half-maintained. Full fields and ongoing photos are a measurable ranking signal.

Does your brand site load in under 2.5 seconds on a 4G connection (LCP-relevant)?

If no: If no — Core Web Vitals are penalizing your search rankings, and the slow first impression is leaking conversion. Image optimization is usually the cheapest fix.

Is your booking widget native to the brand experience, not an iframe or third-party redirect?

If no: If no — the brand experience breaks at the booking flow, which is the moment that matters most.

Does the site work end-to-end on mobile without horizontal scroll, broken touch targets, or layout shift?

If no: If no — most of your traffic is mobile and most of it is converting badly. This is fixable inside two weeks.

Do you have a unified brand presence across the venues, or are you running four separate microsites?

If no: If four microsites — you're working harder than you need to. One brand site with venue-specific sections is more maintainable and stronger SEO.

Is your site indexable by AI search bots (GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended)?

If no: If no — AI search systems can't cite you. Check your robots.txt; the AI search surface is growing fast and you're invisible to it if blocked.