A Grindelwald resort says Canary on top of protel took 25 hours a month off the front desk

Bergwelt Grindelwald, a four star superior alpine resort in Switzerland and part of Swiss Design Collection, has published figures on what layering Canary Technologies over its protel PMS did to its front desk workload. The resort estimates it saves more than 25 staff hours a month, and says dynamic upsells have generated over CHF 500,000 in add-on requests since November 2024, around USD 630,500 at current rates.

The resort runs four Canary products: mobile check-in, guest messaging, dynamic upsells and smart checkout. Pre-arrival registration completed on a guest's phone syncs straight into protel, which is the piece that removes the re-typing.

Why the PMS was the deciding factor

The hotel had been on protel for years, and says Canary's integration capability was a main reason it chose Canary. The go-live happened with no service interruption.

That ordering is the interesting part for anyone in the same position. The resort did not change its PMS to get a modern guest journey. It kept protel and bought the guest-facing layer that could talk to it. For properties on an established system, with years of configuration and staff habit built around it, that is usually the cheaper path, and it reframes the question from "when do we replace the PMS" to "what can we put in front of it".

The constraint is real though. How well the layer works depends entirely on what the PMS exposes through its integration, and that is a vendor decision rather than yours. A sync that covers registration data may not cover everything you would want to automate next.

The numbers, and how to read them

"Before Canary, we used email for all of our pre-arrival communication," said general manager Tanja Münker. The 25 hours a month figure is her estimate for the most recent month, not an audited measure, and a month in an alpine resort is not a representative month.

The CHF 500,000 is add-on requests since November 2024, so close to two years of accumulation across a resort with a spa, several restaurants and curated in-stay experiences. Requests are also not the same as collected revenue, and the case study does not split one from the other. As a per-month or per-room figure it would look very different, and the release does not give a room count to work it out.

One softer result is more transferable: a broadcast message promoting an anniversary event filled the bar and produced nearly double the usual restaurant reservations for a typical night. Any property with on-site food and beverage and a messaging channel to in-house guests can test that in an evening, and it needs no new software if you already have guest messaging switched on.

"Guests love being able to add upgrades from their phones," said guest relations manager Raphael Foller. "The hotel's information flows effortlessly between Canary and protel," said Jana Baumann, administration and project manager at Swiss Design Collection.

The caveat on the source

This is a case study contributed by Canary, with Canary's content marketing team as the media contact, so the framing and the metrics are the vendor's. Nothing in it is independently verified.

Read as a vendor document it is still useful, because it is specific about which products are involved, which PMS they sit on and what the hotel measured. That is more than most case studies give you, and it is enough to build a list of questions for a reference call with a property more like your own.