Why your guests will never download the app
We tried it. Four properties, six months, a 4% install rate — and what happened when we replaced it with a sticker.
Our first version was a native app. It was genuinely good. Almost nobody installed it.
The arithmetic of a three-night stay
A guest arrives tired, at night, on roaming data. To install an app they need the store, a password they have forgotten, 40MB of a connection they do not trust, and a reason to believe the three nights ahead justify it. Four percent of them did. The other ninety-six picked up the phone or waited until morning.
What replaced it
A QR card on the bedside table that opens a web page already tied to the room. No install, no login, no password. Scan rate across the same properties went to 78%.
What we gave up
- Push notifications — replaced with SMS and WhatsApp for anything urgent.
- Offline mode — replaced with a request queue that sends when the connection returns.
- Biometric login — not needed, because there is no account to protect.
The lesson was not that apps are bad. It was that we were asking for a commitment proportional to our interest in the guest, not theirs in us.