Case Study: How The Wexford House Hotel modernised guest communication with PosterBooking

The Client

The Wexford House Hotel occupies a Georgian townhouse a short walk from Bath's city centre, with 42 individually decorated rooms, a small spa, and a restaurant that serves both residents and walk-in diners. The hotel positions itself as a quietly luxurious alternative to the larger chain hotels nearby, with a strong emphasis on personal service and local knowledge.

General manager Helena Pryce has run the property for six years, overseeing a team of around 25 across front of house, housekeeping, food and beverage, and the spa. With a mix of leisure guests, wedding parties and corporate bookings, the hotel needs to communicate a constantly shifting set of information: daily breakfast times, spa offers, event signage for private functions, local recommendations, and seasonal promotions for the restaurant.

Before PosterBooking, all of this ran through paper.

Life Before PosterBooking

Guest-facing communication at Wexford House used to depend heavily on printed materials produced in-house on the office printer and laminator. The front desk kept a folder of templates for welcome letters, directions to local attractions, and spa price lists, all of which were reprinted and replaced by hand whenever details changed, which happened often given seasonal menu changes and rotating promotional offers.

Each of the hotel's three lift landings had a laminated A4 notice pinned to a corkboard, covering fire safety reminders, breakfast times and whatever promotion was currently running. Updating all three meant a member of the front desk team printing new sheets, laminating them, and then walking up three flights (the lift itself being reserved mainly for guests with luggage) to swap out each one, unpinning the old notice and pinning up the new, a round trip Helena estimated took about 25 minutes when all three landings needed updating, which was roughly twice a week.

The reception area had a freestanding chalkboard easel used to welcome specific guests, announce the day's afternoon tea sitting, or flag a private event taking place in one of the function rooms. Someone had to handwrite this each morning, and because staff turnover meant handwriting quality varied, Helena occasionally had to ask for it to be redone if it looked untidy for arriving guests.

The breakfast room relied on a printed menu card at each table, reprinted in batches of 50 whenever the seasonal breakfast offering changed, along with an allergen notice that was supposed to be reviewed monthly but often lagged behind actual kitchen changes because updating it meant redesigning, printing, laminating and replacing a wall-mounted sign near the buffet.

Spa promotions were perhaps the biggest missed opportunity. New treatment offers were only advertised via a printed flyer rack in reception, easy for arriving guests to miss entirely, and restocking the rack with fresh flyers was another small recurring task nobody owned consistently, meaning the rack often sat half empty with outdated offers.

Across all of this, Helena calculated the front desk and admin team were spending around 7 hours a week on printing, laminating, and physically updating signage across the lifts, reception, breakfast room and spa area, with monthly print and laminating costs, including the office printer's running costs, averaging around £180. On top of the direct costs, outdated notices commonly stayed up for several days past their relevance, since nobody wanted to repeat the laminating process more than necessary.

The Solution

Helena had seen digital welcome screens at a conference hotel in Bristol and began researching options suited to a smaller independent property without a large IT budget. PosterBooking stood out for its straightforward cloud dashboard and the ability to start on a free plan while testing it across a handful of screens before deciding whether to expand further.

The hotel rolled out PosterBooking to manage guest welcome messaging, wayfinding, spa and restaurant promotion, and breakfast information, replacing printed notices across reception, the lift landings and the breakfast room with screens controlled centrally from the front office computer.

Where They Implemented It

PosterBooking screens were installed in five locations around the hotel:

• The main reception desk, directly behind the check-in counter, displaying personalised welcome messages for arriving guests, the day's events and weather, visible to everyone checking in.
• Each of the three lift landings, replacing the laminated corkboard notices, now showing a rotating loop of breakfast times, fire safety information, spa offers and wayfinding to the restaurant and spa.
• The breakfast room, mounted near the buffet, showing the current seasonal breakfast menu, allergen information and service times, replacing the printed table cards and buffet signage.

Each screen's playlist is tailored to its location, so the lift landings focus on wayfinding and offers for guests moving through the building, while the breakfast room screen focuses purely on food information relevant to that moment.

The Implementation

Wexford House used Amazon Signage Stick devices for the screens, chosen for their reliability for longer-duration always-on use compared with consumer streaming sticks. Each device was installed behind its screen, connected to the hotel's dedicated guest-facing wifi network, and paired with the PosterBooking dashboard.

Installation took place over an afternoon with the hotel's maintenance contractor mounting the three lift landing screens and the breakfast room screen, while the existing reception television was repurposed for the welcome display. For each screen, installing the PosterBooking app and pairing it with the dashboard took roughly two minutes, with most of the half-day spent on mounting brackets and running power rather than on the software itself.

Helena built the initial content library herself, using PosterBooking's templates to create a consistent branded look across all five screens, matching the hotel's existing colour palette and typography. She set up folders for recurring content types, welcome messages, spa offers, breakfast menus and lift wayfinding, so that front desk staff could later swap specific items in and out without needing to touch the overall design.

Training for the front desk team took around half an hour, covering how to update the welcome screen with a new guest name or event, how to pause or swap a spa promotion, and who to contact if a screen ever needed re-pairing. As with the overall structure, only Helena and her deputy manager were given full editing rights, with front desk staff able to make the day-to-day welcome message updates through a simplified guest view within the dashboard.

Life With PosterBooking

Now, when a wedding party or corporate group arrives, the welcome screen behind reception is updated in under a minute with a personalised greeting, something that previously would have needed a printed sign propped on an easel, if it happened at all. Front desk staff handle this themselves between check-ins.

Spa and restaurant promotions are scheduled in advance by Helena's deputy, who plans a rolling calendar of offers that automatically appear and disappear on the lift landing screens according to a schedule set weeks ahead, meaning promotions always feel current without anyone needing to remember to swap anything manually.

The breakfast room screen updates automatically each season when the kitchen changes its offering, with allergen information updated the same day a dish changes rather than waiting for the next laminating run. Staff have noted a drop in the number of guests asking about allergens at the buffet, since the information is now clearly visible and current rather than buried in a possibly outdated printed notice.

Overall, staff describe the change as having removed a layer of background admin that nobody particularly enjoyed, freeing up front desk time during busy check-in periods that used to be interrupted by signage upkeep.

The hotel has also started using the screens for small touches that were never practical in print. Local event recommendations are refreshed each Monday morning, and when a familiar guest mentions a birthday or anniversary at booking, the team adds a short on-screen greeting for their arrival. These details take seconds to arrange but are regularly mentioned in guest feedback, which the team sees as a quiet return on almost no extra effort.

The hotel has also found an unexpected benefit during private functions. When a wedding party books the function room, the reception and lift landing screens can now display a tailored welcome and directional message for that specific event, something the old laminated corkboard system could never do on short notice. Event hosts have commented favourably on seeing their names and timings displayed professionally as soon as guests arrive, a small touch that previously would have required a printed easel sign ordered days in advance.

The Results: Time and Money Saved

• Weekly admin time spent on printing, laminating and physically swapping signage fell from around 7 hours to under 1.5 hours, saving roughly 5.5 hours a week, or close to 285 hours annualised.
• Monthly print and laminating costs dropped from around £180 to near £0, since reception, lift landing and breakfast room signage are now fully digital.
• Spa treatment bookings attributed to screen promotions increased after moving offers from an easily missed flyer rack to prominent lift landing and reception screens, with the spa team reporting more guests specifically mentioning an offer they saw on screen.
• Repetitive allergen and breakfast time questions at the front desk and buffet dropped noticeably once accurate, current information was always visible on screen rather than relying on guests finding a printed card.
• Welcome messages for arriving groups and VIP guests, previously only possible with advance notice for a printed sign, can now be set up in under a minute at the point of arrival.

Taken together, the time saved on signage admin and the elimination of recurring print costs represent a sizeable annual saving for a hotel of this size, on top of the added revenue from better-promoted spa and restaurant offers.

Testimonial

We used to have someone running up and down three flights of stairs with a laminated sign every time something changed. Now our whole team updates guest messaging from the front desk computer in seconds, and our spa offers finally get the attention they deserve. It has genuinely changed how calm our reception feels during busy check-in periods.

Helena Pryce, General Manager, The Wexford House Hotel

Frequently Asked Questions

Is PosterBooking affordable for a boutique hotel with a handful of screens?

Yes. PosterBooking is free to use for up to 10 screens, which covers most boutique hotels the size of Wexford House comfortably. A watermark appears on free screens once an initial three month trial period ends, and hotels that expand beyond 10 screens pay $6.49 per screen per month from the 11th screen onward.

What devices can we use to run the screens?

PosterBooking supports a range of hardware, including Amazon Fire TV Stick, Amazon Signage Stick or Display, Android TV, Windows, Chromebox and Raspberry Pi. Wexford House chose Amazon Signage Stick devices for their reliability running continuously throughout the day across multiple locations.

How quickly can we get a new screen up and running?

Each screen takes roughly two minutes to set up once it is connected to power and a display. You install the PosterBooking app, pair it to the dashboard with an on-screen code, and it starts pulling content from your account immediately.

Can different screens show different content at the same time?

Yes. Each screen or group of screens can run its own playlist, so a lift landing can display wayfinding and offers while the breakfast room shows menu and allergen information, all managed from the same central dashboard.

What happens if our wifi drops during a busy check-in period?

PosterBooking screens cache their most recent content locally, so they keep playing even during a temporary loss of internet connection. As soon as the connection returns, the screen automatically syncs any updates made in the dashboard while it was offline.

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