No Front Desk, No Problem: How The Lafayette Hotel & Club Runs Check-In From a Coffee Bar

The Challenge

“Our check-in experience is pretty unique,” says Steve Slack, General Manager of The Lafayette Hotel & Club. “We don’t have a traditional front desk — we have this coffee bar, barista situation. It’s very open, free-flowing.”

Running check-in from a coffee bar instead of a desk meant the Lafayette’s team needed a PMS built for mobility, not a terminal bolted to a counter. And with five bars and two restaurants in near-constant operation, the system also had to talk cleanly to point of sale — a requirement that rules out a lot of legacy PMS platforms.

There was a staffing dimension too. Slack has worked with a range of property management systems over his career, and the pattern was familiar: new hires spend their first weeks just learning the software before they can work a shift with confidence.

The Solution

The Lafayette runs Stayntouch’s mobile PMS on tablets, giving front-of-house staff the flexibility to check guests in wherever the operation takes them — coffee bar included.

“Stayntouch was a very user-friendly product,” Slack says. “It works great on a tablet, and that’s often how we have our crew checking people in — with that flexibility. With such a heavy F&B operation, having a good integration with the point-of-sale system matters too.”

The interface itself made a difference for a team that’s frequently onboarding new staff in a fast-moving F&B-driven environment. “It’s really simple. It’s a very intuitive system — bright colors, clearly labeled, easy to use.”

The Results

Faster onboarding. Where other systems took new hires weeks to master, Slack says Stayntouch closes that gap dramatically: “Sometimes it’ll take weeks to really fully grasp [a PMS]. I think with Stayntouch, within the first shift, you can get someone comfortable checking a guest in and feeling confident using the system.” Onboarding support from Stayntouch’s team reinforced that speed: “They have a really strong onboarding team. The training was very helpful.”

A product that keeps moving. Slack points to Stayntouch’s release cadence as a standout: “My personal favorite thing about it is that the product is always growing and developing. There are new releases, new updates. When we’ve expressed, ‘Hey, we’d really like to see this,’ those enhancements have come down the pipeline.”

Support that’s actually responsive. “As far as support goes — the responsiveness — if I need something, I have people at Stayntouch I can reach out to directly and get it done.”

Why it Matters

For a hotel built around an unconventional guest journey — no front desk, five bars, constant motion — the PMS has to disappear into the background rather than dictate how the operation runs. For The Lafayette Hotel & Club, Stayntouch’s mobile-first design, fast learning curve, and responsive team have let the property run check-in exactly the way it wants to: open, flexible, and centered on the guest.