MOBILE APPS & IOT

Solution

The vacation resorts of the future are currently being built in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Brandenburg: the Prima Resorts. An innovative retreat featuring tiny houses, RV and tent sites, a sauna and wellness facilities, regular events, and dining options. Our client, the real estate developer Prima from Neuruppin, commissioned us to design and develop a mobile app for Apple and Android that integrates all on-site IT systems and provides guests with an innovative, accessible vacation experience.  

One app for everything

 Thanks to the Digital Vacation Assistant, a smartphone app, guests will be able to conveniently handle everything from a single source right on their phones: book their stay, check the weather, add extras at any time, reserve a time slot in the sauna and a table in the restaurant, open the door to their Tiny House, and chat with customer service. 

You can also learn more about the project in an NDR article: ndr.de

Concept & Design 

We develop the concept and design together with our partner for UX, design, and marketing, ideenmanufaktur from Berlin. Regular concept workshops with our client ensure a smooth process from the initial idea to the implementation of product concepts into concrete designs, and guarantee that the app not only works but also looks great. Designers and developers communicate efficiently on this project via Figma and Notion. This allows questions about implementation to be posted directly as comments on the design and answered there. 

Requirements Management & Design Thinking 

A wide variety of requirements and constantly changing conditions characterize many complex software projects. The question is how to handle them. We apply the Design Thinking method in this project to answer one key question together with the client in every project phase: What does the client want, and what added value can I provide with my product that other products do not offer? User-centered thinking has specifically helped us find the most user-friendly solution for opening the Tiny House doors and the check-in process. 

Off-the-shelf software vs. in-house development 

In the hospitality market, there are many standard apps for digital guest experiences. These are either standalone products that must be fed data separately, leading to redundant data storage and high maintenance costs. Or they are “offshoots” of larger providers such as property management systems, ERP, or similar software. However, these can typically only cover their own domain, meaning data and functions from other software components are left out. The solution: A custom-developed app that integrates standard systems via middleware and interfaces, handling domain-specific tasks such as bookings, payment processing, inventory management, or table reservations. The middleware centralizes the necessary data for guests and manages communication between all components. From the very beginning, we advised our client with an open-technology approach and did not favor any specific software. At the end of the analysis, the decision was made to use the MEWS PMS and Lightspeed POS. Additional services and providers are currently still in the evaluation process. 

Project Management: Reaching the Goal with Scrum & MVP 

In every phase, we focus on the MVP, the Minimum Viable Product. An MVP is a self-contained piece of software that can be launched at any time—for example, to gather customer feedback at an early stage and improve the product. It is also the concrete, so to speak “tangible” result of a “sprint”—the one to four weeks that a development cycle lasts. The Scrum methodology, a widely used approach in agile project management, helps organize and optimize this process. You can find more about MVPs and proofs of concept in the Services section: MVP-development 

Complex Technical Solutions: Middleware & Interfaces 

Our developers and software architects designed a flexible and tailored software architecture, taking into account all existing software components. These include providers of property management systems (PMS), inventory management and point-of-sale (POS) systems, table reservations and digital menus, access control systems, weather data, and more. And to ensure our client remains flexible in the future, the data model can be adapted as needed to accommodate new requirements, software components, and updates to third-party systems. Technically speaking, this is a "headless" solution—a software architecture without its own backend. The data is stored in the backends of the third-party systems; they serve as the "single point of truth." Communication with the third-party systems is handled by FastAPI, the frontend is developed with Vue.js, and the app platforms for smartphones are deployed via Capacitor. As is standard in all our projects, we use Datadog for infrastructure monitoring and Sentry for error logging. We are also using Datadog for the first time to implement end-to-end tests. 

You can learn more about our technology stack here: The devsuit Tech-Stack