Andi Newcomer was working around 60 hours a week and operations were running fine. Events were booked, clients were happy, the conference centre was in demand. The problem was that she had no way to see where the performance was coming from.
Best Western Boulder Falls Inn is an 84-room hotel in Lebanon, Oregon, built around a one-acre Japanese garden, with a conference centre that holds up to 600 guests and a range of flexible event spaces. By any measure, a well-run property. But the systems holding it together were generating almost no useful information. Revenue was tracked at a property level. How individual function rooms were contributing to that number was anybody’s guess.
“It was clear we were just wasting time and money trying to make an old system work,” Andi said.
The team tracked everything across documents maintained by hand. Remote access required setup arranged in advance, which meant urgent issues after hours either waited or someone came in. Seasonal menu updates took over a week. Customising event documents beyond a basic template was a slow, manual process. None of this was unusual for a hotel running older venue management software: it just meant that the busier things got, the more time disappeared into administration.
The search for something practical
When Boulder Falls Inn began evaluating new systems — venue management software alongside a broader move to a new property management platform — Andi knew what she needed. Fully online. Flexible enough for the way the team worked. Straightforward enough that adoption wouldn’t become its own project.
Going live on two platforms simultaneously is rarely smooth, and the contrast between the two experiences was sharp. One came with workarounds from the start. iVvy came with training clear enough that the team could navigate it with minimal guidance, and support that provided answers when they did reach out.
Her advice to other events managers considering a similar move: after years on a limited system, the instinct is to assume you’ll need to rebuild your processes from scratch. She found that most of what the team needed was already there. The value of proper onboarding was in learning where to look.
What the data revealed
Boulder Falls Inn’s revenue shift came from being able to see, for the first time, how each function room was performing on its own.
Once per-space reporting was in place, two rooms emerged as consistently underperforming relative to the rest. The team adjusted their marketing focus accordingly. Within eight months, those two rooms were generating 43% more revenue.
“With iVvy’s reporting capabilities, we gained visibility into the performance of individual event spaces,” Andi said.
“This allowed us to identify two underutilised rooms and adjust our marketing strategy to focus on them. As a result, we’ve seen a 43% increase in revenue from those spaces over the past eight months.”
The insight had been sitting in the data the whole time. There was just no efficient way to surface it.
Where the hours went
Time savings were just as measurable. Seasonal menu updates that had previously taken over a week now took minutes. Event coordinators moved onto iPads during events, feeding updates through the system in real time instead of reconciling records afterwards. Clients sign contracts electronically, including a custom catering contract the team built inside the platform.
Andi’s working week came down from around 60 hours to 45. The hotel’s Director of Sales experienced a similar shift. With the team handling more of their daily tasks without escalating to management, the hours that had been going to system administration started going somewhere more useful.
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For a hotel operation already doing the right things commercially, the 43% revenue lift from two function rooms came from finally being able to read what was already happening and making one straightforward decision based on what they saw.
