ALICE Hosts Second Annual 100% Virtual Company Hackathon

In February 2021, ALICE hosted our second annual company-wide hackathon. ALICE employees with different talents and passions 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

Teams were made up of employees from different departments (Marketing, Design, Sales, Support, Engineering, etc.) with the goal of delivering a final presentation on their product, its functions, and what ALICE would have to do to make it possible. This hackathon celebrated more than just coding, the judges and audience evaluated packaging of the product (how to sell it, how to launch it, how to price it) as well as the execution of the product (how complete it is, how many product points it will take in the future). 

One of ALICE’s greatest assets is its diverse, multinational workforce, with our team working remotely across 13 different countries, and 17 different states. 40% of our entire company participated on a hackathon team across 5 different teams. 

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. 

Our judges for our 2021 Hackathon were: 

Why do we do hackathons at ALICE?

With a 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). 

We are looking forward to our 2022 ALICE Hackathon next year!