The morning brief

The brief opens on a full screen of painting. Over it sit the date and the time, a greeting with your first name, the weekday set large as the title, and one line naming your property. The work is drawn by the calendar day from 365 in the public domain, so tomorrow opens on a different one. Down the left edge the sections waiting below are listed in the order you will meet them.

The first card under the opening screen is the work itself: the title, then a credit line carrying the artist, the year and the medium, then a short note on the painting in your own language. Open the card and the work is shown whole, letterboxed rather than cropped, with the full gallery label beneath it. Tomorrow brings a different canvas, and a brief you reopen from the archive still carries the one it had.

Under the painting a strip of pills carries the fixed hours of the day. The weather leads with the temperature, the condition and the day's low and high. Then everything with a clock on it, in clock order: the VIP arrival at 11:30, check-out until 12:00, the second VIP at 13:00, check-in from 14:00. The dated events come last. The strip wraps to as many rows as it needs, so the next few hours read without opening the reservations page.

Reminders you put on your own notes are pulled into the morning read, up to six of them. Anything due today sits next to anything whose time passed while the app was closed, and the late ones are marked in red with an overdue label. A reminder left over from an earlier day carries its date. The section appears only when something is waiting, so a property that keeps no reminders never sees it.

Four headlines from the sector, chosen by the language the panel is in. A Turkish panel is fed by the Turkish trade press, an English one by the international titles. Each row carries the headline, the standfirst and a footer with the source and the date. Open a row and the same summary is set out with the long date and a button through to the news page.

Two demand events off the radar, each with its date, venue and district, and the occupancy lift the forecast expects from it. The stadium concert on 1 October is marked at +42%, the derby at RAMS Park on 27 November at +24%. Open one and you get the ADR impact and the booking pace, then the rate window it suggests: the dates, the uplift, and a minimum stay where there is one. The same two events sit in the agenda strip at the top of the brief, so a spike is not read once and forgotten.

Four numbers for the property: how full you are, how many guests are in the building, how many arrivals the desk has to absorb today, and what guests are scoring the stay. Under a hairline the first three are written out again as one sentence with the property name in it, so the position can be read without parsing the grid. Any of the four opens larger, with a button through to the dashboard.

Three readings in one panel. The five biggest rows of the source mix, each with its guest count, the direction it is moving and a bar scaled against the largest row, with the Other bucket sitting among the countries. Then the booking channels as a single bar, direct first and then each OTA, with the percentages listed underneath. Then a position row: occupancy, market share, and your rank in the market. The biggest market and the fastest riser are rarely the same country, and that is usually the useful part.

ADR and RevPAR at the top, then each room type with its move against it: Suite $389, up 6.8%. Under those sits one recommendation with the money attached, so the morning rate call starts from a proposal instead of a blank sheet. Then the next seven days as seven bars, gold where the rate is where it should be and dimmer where it is not, so Sunday's $240 reads as low without opening the pricing page. Any row opens a detail card, and that card carries the button through to the pricing page.

A summary line, then four counters: live listings, matches, bookings, and the agency demands nothing of yours matches yet. Under them the auto mode switch, which decides whether requests need a person at all. When an agency reserves one of your listings the request lands below it with the agency, the room count, the nightly rate and the dates, and accept or decline on the row itself; with nothing waiting the line says so. Then the hotels new to the network. Last, when a room type is sitting empty in the PMS, Claire proposes opening a listing at a price with the revenue it would bring, and opening it from here publishes that listing to the network.

The line at the top is the day's volume, 42 arrivals against 36 departures. Under it three names with the VIPs sorted first, each with the room they are in or going into, the time, and the one note attached to them. The rush clean in progress on 412 and the folio under review by accounting are in front of the manager before the desk has to bring them up.

Three repeat guests, each with the stays behind them, the lifetime value and the rating on the profile, hung off a coloured rule for the loyalty tier. Catherine Park at 14 stays and $28.4k is a different conversation from a first booking, and nobody has to open a guest file to know it.

One line carries the property score, the number of reviews and how many are still owed a reply: 4.4★, 187 reviews, 6 awaiting reply. Under it two recent guest comments quoted in full, each with the author, the channel it came from and the rating. The second one here asks for better soundproofing on the street side, which is the theme the next section has already counted.

The first two themes on the list, each with its mention count and a proposed fix written under it. Street noise, 14 mentions, acoustic-rated windows on rooms 201-218 with the expected reduction stated. Slow wifi, 11 mentions, a second access point per floor. The reading is already done, and each line arrives with something to do about it.

Two notes from the shift that just ended, pinned first, each with the author, the shift and the time it was written. The night audit closed clean with one folio mismatch flagged to accounting. The pinned note says a VIP lands at 11:30, a rush clean has been requested for room 412, and the GM wants paging on arrival. The morning team reads the night in the night's own notes, without waiting for the handover at the desk.

The page ends with one line in Claire's name saying what the brief was assembled from: the front desk, the reviews, the events and the local news. Apart from the handover notes the night shift wrote, nothing on the page was typed this morning.

The brief is not a page you open from scratch. It runs a short preparation pass, and it starts three ways: the keyboard shortcut from anywhere in the product, the sunrise button in the topbar on wide screens, or on its own, once a day, at the briefing time you set. The default is 09:00 and it needs a tab open. When it is ready a card appears in the corner with the day's painting on it, wherever you are. The page it opens is one column, with the section rail down the left listing what has something in it today.

Seven rows cover the brief itself: on or off, whether it opens by itself, the briefing time, the desktop notification, sounds, the demo re-prepare switch, and the daily artwork, which can be the day's painting, a random one, or nothing at all. Under them sits one switch per section, twelve of them, so a property that never prices its own rooms turns Price predictions off and it stops appearing. The choices are kept in the browser, so tomorrow morning the brief opens in the shape you left it.

The archive lists the last fourteen days, yesterday back to two weeks ago, with today left out. Each row carries that day's painting as a thumbnail beside the weekday and the date, so last Saturday is found by its picture rather than by counting back. Open one and the brief re-renders for that date, with the clock fixed at 09:00 and a lime 'Past brief' line under the timestamp.