After sending booking inquiries to 39 hotels, I realized there was only so much I could learn from my laptop.
If I wanted to understand how hotels actually handled guest communication, I had to start walking into them.
My assumption was straightforward. Somewhere inside each hotel, there was probably one person responsible for guest communication.
Finding that person turned out to be much harder than I expected.
At most hotels, I couldn't get past the front desk.
The staff were always polite. They listened. They nodded. Then they handed me a business card and told me to follow up by email.
I kept going. Different hotels, different cities, same outcome.
By the end of the trips, I had collected more than fifty business cards.
I still have them.
Some of the business cards I collected while visiting hotels across Thailand.
The number wasn't what surprised me. It was what the cards said.
Sales@. Reservations@. Info@. Some were personal — a staff member's name and direct email. Others pointed to general inboxes that may or may not have been monitored by anyone in particular.
There was no obvious pattern. No obvious person.
I started emailing.
Some hotels asked me to introduce my company first. Some wanted to see a portfolio before connecting me with management. Some asked me to send information and said they would pass it along internally.
At some point during these trips, one hotel told me something I didn't expect.
Their LINE and Facebook guest communication wasn't handled at the property. It was managed by someone in Bangkok.
It caught me completely off guard.
The hotel was in front of me.
But the person responsible for guest communication wasn't.
By then, I'd stopped looking for patterns.
Every hotel seemed to have built its own way of communicating with guests.
Different teams.
Different responsibilities.
Different workflows.
None of them looked exactly alike.
I didn't realize it at the time, but those conversations were quietly changing the way I thought about Ekkamai.
If every hotel worked differently, maybe the software shouldn't assume they all worked the same.
There was one thing almost every hotel had in common.
LINE.
I expected it to be another communication channel.
It turned out to be much more important than that.
