Elmshornhof Hotel Hamburg tripled front-desk speed with Arrivals Digest

The problem

The 07:00 shift changeover at Elmshornhof used to take 45 minutes. The incoming front-office manager would sit at the reception PC, print the arrivals list from Protel, walk it to the shift meeting, cross-reference notes on VIPs from a private OneNote, cross-reference booked add-ons from the previous evening's F&B report, and only then start briefing the reception team. By the time the first guest checked in at 08:15, the manager had done what should have been a 12-minute administrative task in 45.

The problem was not that Protel could not print the arrivals list — it could, cleanly. The problem was that the useful shift briefing lived across three systems and one person's head. Every morning was a manual mash-up.

What we did

Elmshornhof subscribed to Arrivals Digest for Protel Login in April 2025. Setup took 12 minutes: their Protel administrator generated a scoped API token, we pasted it into the Weareplonet dashboard, and we configured the digest to fire at 06:30 local time to a shared mailbox monitored by the incoming shift.

The digest replaced the manual mash-up. It arrived every morning at 06:30, grouped guests by expected arrival window, highlighted VIPs (loyalty tier, repeat stays, notes tagged VIP), showed the last three folio notes per reservation, and included per-guest booked add-ons pulled from the same Protel folio.

The outcome

Elmshornhof measured shift-changeover time for six weeks before adopting the digest, and for six weeks after. The average dropped from 45 minutes to 12 — the OneNote and the F&B report cross-references disappeared because the digest already had them. The 33 minutes saved per shift compounded across three shifts a day, which is roughly 100 hours of front-office manager time recovered per month.

Two secondary effects, harder to measure, showed up as well. Reception's recognition rate of returning guests improved measurably (the manager stopped being a bottleneck for the "have we had this guest before?" question), and the number of complaints about missed add-ons at check-in dropped to almost zero because the digest surfaced them one shift ahead.

What Elmshornhof did next

Six weeks after Arrivals Digest was live, they added Nightly Trial Balance for their controller, and three months later OTA Reconciliation. The pattern — start with one module, prove the value, add the next — is the one we recommend to almost every new property.

"It is not glamorous software," said Katrin Meier, GM at Elmshornhof. "But it took a job my team was doing badly by hand and made it invisible. That is the highest compliment I can pay any hotel system."