ALICE Hosts a 100% Virtual Company Hackathon

In June, ALICE hosted a company-wide hackathon. ALICE employees from all backgrounds came together to form cross-functional teams around a single mission: “How can we put our greatest minds together to come up with innovative solutions to help the Hospitality industry rebound post COVID-19?”. 

How ALICE’s Hackathon worked: 

Our hackathon was split into three days: 

1. Ideation Day 
2. Implementation Day
3. Demo Day

To bridge the gap between those who code and those who don’t, this hackathon celebrated the idea as much as the execution. Teams were put together across all functions (Marketing, Design, Sales, Support, Engineering, etc.) with the goal of having one idea per team presented at the end. Our judges and our audience celebrated the packaging of the product (how to sell it, how to launch it, how to price it) as much as the execution of the product (how complete it is, how many product points it will take in the future). 

One thing that is unique about ALICE is that our team works remotely across 13 different countries, and 17 different states. With a bit of planning (and flexibility from team members around the world!)  we were able to have a 100% virtual hackathon with our international team. 

At the end, we capped off the hackathon with a Judge’s Choice Award - selected by a panel of our leadership, as well as a People’s Choice - voted on by everyone in the company. 

Why did we do a hackathon at ALICE?

With a slow and steady recovery expected from COVID-19, we believe that hotel budgets will be prioritized against products and services that help hotels do more with less. We want to challenge everyone here to team up and bring all of our combined experience together to come up with innovative products and features that help our hotels achieve more with less and help the industry rebound. We also wanted to give the chance for teams to work cross-departmentally and on different projects outside their roles (for example, giving an engineer the opportunity to work on a marketing plan for a new product). 

There were four main goals of all the ideas and products produced by the hackathon teams: 

The hackathon teams had the following goals for their new products: 

1. Help hotels recover quicker
2. Build trust with guests 
3. Maintain at lower occupancy
4. Deliver great service with lower staff count

Here were the some of the ideas presented: 

And here were some of the finalized demos: