Fireside Inn has been welcoming guests on East Bay Street for one hundred and thirty-one years. Until last spring, it ran on Cloudbeds — a fine product, in the way an airport is a fine place to wait. Twenty-two rooms. Eleven staff. A property management bill that started at $580 a month and reached $920 by the time we met Camille.
The inn's actual rhythm — quiet check-ins at four, room twelve's preference for two pillows, the way the night manager keeps a private list of guests who like the corner suite — none of that was in the software. It was in Camille's notebook, the kind with the elastic loop, kept in the front desk drawer.
"A check-in screen that doesn't look like an air-traffic control panel. A way to mark a room as turned but not yet inspected without inventing a workaround. A guest profile that remembers their dog's name. Nothing else."
That was the brief. We did not add anything. The result is what you see overleaf — a single ledger, three statuses per room, and a notes field that accepts handwriting fonts because Camille insisted.
— pulled from our shared notebook with Camille, Sept '24.
Watched four check-ins. Camille typed each guest's name into Cloudbeds, then again into a Word document she keeps for "real notes." We counted seventeen distinct fields she filled in for one couple. Three were the same field.
The notebook in the drawer turned out to be the actual product. We took a photograph of one page, with permission, and used it as the design north star for the entire engagement.
— S.One screen. Twenty-two rows. Status, guest, dates, note. Camille's response, after looking at it for ninety seconds: "where is everything else." We told her there was nothing else. She agreed there shouldn't be.
— S.Six years of bookings, eleven thousand guest records, a hundred and forty saved preferences. Loaded clean. Camille verified room 12's pillow note transferred. It did. That was the day we knew it would work.
— S.Cloudbeds wound down on a Wednesday afternoon. The repository, the Postgres backup, and the runbook were handed to Camille on a USB stick, plus a copy in her Google Drive. She poured a bourbon. Said one sentence — "now it sounds like the inn again."
— S.The software finally shuts up at the right moments. That is the whole review.