Exclusive Interview | Utkarsh Sinha, Chief Technology Officer, Haven
/“We’re on a mission to make guest experience a tangible focus area for hotels to drive more business & revenue.
We envision a bright future where guests receive seamless, personalised services inside the hotel and outside, making their travel journeys more engaging & fulfilled.”
What inspired you to transition from building enterprise products to creating Haven, a digital guest experience platform for the hospitality industry?
I’m an avid traveller and enjoy staying in different kinds of hotels. As a guest, I’ve had varied experiences, from hotels delivering truly unforgettable experiences, to some completely failing at basic service expectations.
As guests, it’s easy to complain and criticise hotel services. But with a little empathy and research, I realised that even when hotel teams have the best intentions, they face significant challenges in delivering great service.
Issues like inadequate staff training, unclear service standards, lack of accountability, and insufficient tools to capture guest feedback all play a role. On top of that, the industry’s slow adoption of technology only makes things harder.
We saw an opportunity here to build a guest experience platform to help hoteliers overcome these challenges and achieve higher levels of service for their guests.
Our experience in building products for startups and enterprises gave us the confidence to apply our expertise in solving these challenges for the hospitality industry. We’re on a mission to embed guest experience into the heart of every hotel’s daily operations. We believe caring about guest experience is an obvious win-win for both hotels & guests, which can lead to more unforgettable stays for travellers like me.
As a technology professional with over a decade of experience, what has been your most significant learning about balancing innovation with user needs?
When building products it’s easy to get carried away in the inventiveness of features, but what’s important to understand is that our users are real people.
Real people with real problems.
For example:
- New parents struggling to get milk for their baby due to a busy hotel intercom.
- Corporate guests waiting on fresh towels, while running late for a morning meeting.
- Elderly parents needing housekeeping assistance to adjust the AC temperature.
While on the staff side:
- Front desk staff overwhelmed with guest requests during peak check-in hours.
- Housekeeping staff writing down guest requests in notepads, with no accountability or time tracking.
These are all real situations.
Therefore building solutions that address user’s pain-points, and building with a sense of urgency, is a way to have the most impact.
With this aim, it becomes easy to strip out the fancy unimportant stuff, and focus on the most essential parts of use-case, helping us launch solutions & test our assumptions fast.
At Haven, we believe simple is better.
You’ve worked closely with startup founders as CTO of Betaflux Consulting. How has that experience influenced your approach to building Haven?
At Betaflux Consulting, we’ve helped founders and enterprises build & launch game-changing products across industries like Automotive, Fintech, F&B, Travel-Tech, and Last Mile Tech.
When we started, we met founders who spent months and significant resources on product development, only to face launch delays due to product flaws and software vendor incompatibilities.
Another major challenge was the endless feature loop, keeping founders always hesitant if the product was ready to launch.
Therefore, with every customer we introduced our philosophy of — getting to a launch within the first 3 months, with a plan for iterative improvements later. This immediately pushed every discussion & decision with our clients towards “what was truly essential for launch”. Anything that wasn’t, got cut out of the development plan.
This approach added a lot of clarity and discipline, and enabled our clients to test their product assumptions with a simpler product in a limited budget.
I'm proud to share that over 90% of our projects have been successfully launched and are now in the hands of users, rather than getting drowned into limbo.
This philosophy and approach has informed our team to maintain the same discipline and commitment to launch at Haven. We aim to design features that can solve real user problems and put it in the hands of users as quickly as we can, and ensure customer feedback informs our journey forward.
Your passion for futuristic technology like AI and space travel is inspiring. How do these interests shape your vision for technology’s role in hospitality?
As a kid, I dreamed of becoming an astronaut, fascinated by NASA’s Mars missions and the breakthroughs shaping space exploration. While I didn’t end up in the space industry, I feel incredibly lucky to be part of the tech industry, witnessing the software revolution first hand and businesses leverage it to improve our daily lives.
It all started with improving internet connectivity and the cloud, which opened the floodgates of information access and online services like — travel & hotel bookings, food delivery, ride-hailing and more. We also saw private companies take bold risks, pioneer reusable rockets, robotics, self-driven cars and disrupt an industry once dominated by research oriented government agencies.
We are now on the brink of an AI revolution, when democratisation of generative AI is enabling businesses to tackle complex problems; things which we thought were outside the reach of machines like — speech, vision, reasoning, creativity, and communication.
As businesses embrace AI and customers grow accustomed to its capabilities, the hospitality industry will also need to evolve. Future guests will expect seamless, AI-driven experiences as the norm.
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The Future:
Imagine taking a road-trip in a self-driving car, asking the AI assistant embedded in your car to book a hotel.
It finds you the perfect stay, and engages with the hotel’s AI agent to hash out the details of your booking, arrival time, and any other data required.
As you approach, your AI assistant informs hotel teams of your impending arrival.
The hotel staff greets you, asks you about your plans for the stay and your preferences.
The hotel’s AI agent embedded in the staff’s collar device takes notes and recommends interesting itineraries to your personal AI to make relevant bookings.
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It’s a long way to this vision. But it’s worth the effort and the wait.
How does Haven’s Guest App challenge the status quo in hospitality, and what differentiates it from other digital solutions?
All this while, technology in hospitality has revolved primarily around back-office operations like managing check-in & check-outs, guest identification, room management and billing with tools like OTAs, PMSs, Channel Managers, Revenue Management Systems, and POS.
These softwares have taken no ownership of the guest experience part of a stay, lacking any guest-facing solutions, leaving everything to hotel staff’s personal interaction and soft skills.
However, the hospitality landscape is evolving, with guests seeking digital services with deeper personalisation, offers and experiences. This is especially true for Millennials and Gen-Z, who value digitisation and like sharing their experiences on social media as a way to score up amongst peers.
To meet these expectations, hotels need smart tools to provide innovative digital offerings, monitor service quality, respond to guest feedback, and create unforgettable experiences that guests can rave about.
None of which is available today within the existing hospitality tech-stack.
That’s the change we want to bring in the world.
Through Haven’s Guest App we provide guest-facing features like digital in-room ordering & housekeeping, upsell offers & promotions, guest support, that place guest experience at the heart of hotel operations all while providing hoteliers with data & insights to make smarter decisions and maintain exceptional service.
We believe this is key to making guests feel truly cared for — and delivering great hospitality.
What steps have you taken to ensure Haven is scalable and easy to integrate for hoteliers across diverse property types in India?
Haven is a cloud-based solution that can be deployed at any hotel within just two days, including staff training. Our guest-centric features are valuable for all hotel types — from small hotels in the boutique or economy category, to larger hotels in the midscale, upscale and luxury category.
Boutique & Economy hotels can boost their reputation & revenues by providing digital room services, unique local experiences and upsells to their guests via the Haven’s Guest App.
Whereas larger properties, including resorts and luxury hotels, can use Haven to showcase their amenities, inform guests about available experiences, and promote special offers for golf, spas, events, and other unique services. They can also use our Guest Support feature and Data Analytics to track issues reported by guests and gaps in service to improve overall satisfaction of guests.
Currently, Haven operates independently without needing integration with other hotel software.
It runs seamlessly on the hotel’s existing desktop computers, tablets, and smartphones, allowing hotels to start using it immediately and seeing value right away. With automatic cloud updates, they receive the latest features and improvements instantly—no manual installations or downtime.
Plus, Haven’s Guest App works on any mobile browser, eliminating the need for downloads and ensuring effortless guest adoption.
We've focused heavily on designing Haven to be incredibly easy to understand and operate — unlike legacy hotel softwares which is super complicated and requires tons of training. Many early adopters, hoteliers and industry veterans have praised our intuitive design and ease of use.
How does Haven’s digital platform enhance in-room dining, housekeeping, and upsell experiences for guests while driving ROI for hoteliers?
Until now, hotel guests have had to browse worn-out paper/pdf menus, call the front desk, and verbally place orders for food or housekeeping requests like extra towels and pillows. Many times guests get frustrated when they do not get their special requests/customisations fulfilled due to miscommunication or language barriers.
Upsell offers for room upgrades, evening drinks, or tour packages are often pitched at check-in—when guests are exhausted and just want to settle into their room. For these reasons, such a guest service feels truly outdated in the age of online ordering.
Haven’s QR-led Guest App improves upon this experience letting guests seamlessly place IRD orders and Housekeeping requests via dynamic menus (not just pdfs), choose customisations and add preferences. Guests also receive live order updates that help reduce anxiety.
No busy phone lines. No miscommunications. Just seamless ordering and tracking.
Haven lets F&B managers add micro-upsells in the menu, for example, “Add a drink” with “Fish & Chips”, “Add a desert” with “Mac n Cheese”.
Housekeeping managers can add chargeable items like Laundry service, Extra Bed, and more.
Concierge can cab rates, festival offers & experiences at the hotel right in the Guest App.
All these help hotels drive more revenue and increase ROI. Moreover, guests feel engaged and delighted during their stay.
Guest satisfaction is critical in hospitality. How does Haven ensure its features deliver a seamless and superior digital experience?
Guest satisfaction is paramount for Haven, and our entire focus revolves around helping hotels deliver great Guest Experience. Our Haven Guest app is easily accessible by scanning a QR-code at the front-desk or inside the rooms at their convenience. It doesn’t require any app downloads.
Apart from digital IRD & requests, guests can view listings of all hotel facilities with timings and general information on the tip of their fingers such as — pool, golf courses, restaurants & their menus, spas, kids activities, games, and more.
Hotels can also add local experiences and travel guidebooks for outstation guests.
In an era where digital transformation is reshaping industries, how do you see Haven influencing the future of guest experience in Indian hotels?
We aim to encourage more hotels to adopt a guest-facing digital experience, and enable them to provide unique upsells, offerings and experiences to guests during their stay.
Not just leave it to chance, but proactively offer these services through a channel that guests feel comfortable engaging with.
We’re on a mission to make guest experience a tangible focus area for hotels to drive more business & revenue.
We envision a bright future where guests receive seamless, personalised services inside the hotel and outside, making their travel journeys more engaging & fulfilled.
What future features or capabilities are you planning for Haven to further revolutionize the digital guest experience in the hospitality industry?
We are reimagining from first principles how effective management of guest issues, menu engineering, pre-check in identification & other service offerings can have a huge impact on guest experience.
We are here to lend our ears to passionate hoteliers who deeply care about guest experience, and build for features that help them succeed.
