La Palmilla: Launching a 5-Star contactless resort with zero prior hotel experience

Spanish-inspired luxury meets modern hospitality at La Palmilla Boutique Resort, nestled in the heart of Glen Rose, Texas. Opened in June 2023, the resort’s unique units and bedrooms immerse guests in exquisite Spanish Colonial design, offering a uniquely personalized experience for every guest stay, event, wedding, or retreat.

La Palmilla’s stunning Casa Del Ray serves as a breathtaking venue for weddings. Featuring classic Spanish Colonial architecture and Dalle de Verre stained glass, the onsite chapel seats up to 200 guests indoors, making it a picturesque setting for any ceremony.

What’s more,  La Palmilla is a nontoxic hotel, utilizing plant-based cleaning products and high temperature LadyBug vacuums to set a precedent throughout the hotel industry for environmentally-friendly, safe, and healthy accommodation. 

Prior to opening, the La Palmilla team had not used a Property Management System (PMS) before. They also didn’t come from hospitality backgrounds. 

Owner and Co-Founder Kimmie Ellis recognized the importance of sourcing the right hospitality platform to meet the unique needs of her property. As a large portion of their profits were going to come from events — weddings, retreats, and corporate events — group bookings functionality was especially crucial. 

After evaluating several options in-depth, the team chose Cloudbeds PMS for its ease of use, flexibility, accessibility, customization, guest experience automation, and robust capabilities in handling both group and individual bookings.

For a property like La Palmilla with no physical front desk, fully digital check-in, and contactless service, Cloudbeds Guest Experience enables the property’s contactless functionality, streamlines group bookings, and provides robust guest journeys. 

Not only does this help to streamline operations but it also significantly cuts down on labor-related costs like front desk staff and night managers.

Contactless guest journey

At La Palmilla, the guest experience kicks off before arrival. Once a booking is made, guests receive a digital liability waiver. On the day of arrival, a series of messages are delivered to guests leading up to check-in with access codes, property directions, and check-in information.

Kimmie’s team informs guests well in advance that La Palmilla is a contactless property, ensuring a smooth and modern check-in experience.  If there’s any confusion, staff are available to assist, either online or through on-site support. 

Cloudbeds also supports thoughtful touches post-stay. As Kimmie puts it,

I love that Cloudbeds has a tool to schedule emails for guests after they check out. Once a guest departs, they receive an email from us saying, ‘We hope you have a safe journey home. Here’s a playlist from your stay to remind you of us.’

This enables Kimmie and her team to focus on their guests and create meaningful connections. Clearly these efforts are paying off, given La Palmilla has nearly 300 5-star reviews on Google.

Group bookings are at the heart of La Pamilla’s business, driving revenue from weddings, retreats, and corporate events. Cloudbeds’ group booking functionality, combined with its integration with Event Temple, further simplifies La Palmilla’s event management processes.

We have events, weddings, church retreats, and nonprofit organizations that do full buyouts. Having a special group booking link where they can buy out the cantina, chapel space, and hotel rooms is great for us.

Cloudbeds’ renowned ease of use has proven to be the perfect choice for the first-time hotel owners, empowering them — and their mostly-remote team — to quickly feel confident navigating a PMS.   

This is further supported by Cloudbeds University. Boasting on-demand access to relevant courses and 100+ training videos, it lets Kimmie equip her staff with the knowledge, training, and confidence to do their job properly, even when trained remotely on a limited time frame.

“Cloudbeds’ ease of use and its university helps us train our staff very well, even our remote staff on the other side of the world. They pick up on so much in such a short amount of time. We dedicate two weeks for them to get to know Cloudbeds and then we train them on top of that. That has saved us a lot of time,” explains Kimmie.

Cloudbed’s intuitive interface also helps bridge language barriers for La Palmilla’s non-English speaking housekeeping staff. It also grants Kimmie’s team real-time updates for housekeeping status of rooms, ensuring last-minute bookings are seamlessly managed.

All in all, La Palmilla’s experience with Cloudbeds has been instrumental in achieving its vision of modern contactless hospitality. From smooth group bookings to contactless guest experiences, Cloudbeds continues to impress Kimmy and her team.

Cloudbeds has done a fantastic job making the guest and staff experience seamless. Its comprehensive solution includes all the features we need to run our property with a smaller, simpler tech stack.

By combining innovative technology like Cloudbeds, with thoughtful guest engagement, La Palmilla continues to deliver exceptional experiences every stay.