How The Leading Hotels of the World Is Onboarding the World’s Most Exclusive Properties — with OnRamp

An Eight-Week Onboarding Process Run on Email and Spreadsheets

Every newly accepted hotel begins an intensive eight-week implementation journey owned end-to-end by Ivo Malinaric, Head of Implementations, and his team. During that window, the implementation team gathers everything LHW needs to bring the hotel live across its central reservation system, its consumer website, every distribution channel, and the marketing engine that promotes the property globally.

Before OnRamp, that work was coordinated through a tangle of Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, and email threads flying back and forth between LHW, the hotel, and a half-dozen internal departments. The problems compounded as the business grew:

• Hotels — luxury operators accustomed to bespoke, white-glove experiences — found a spreadsheet-driven intake archaic and frustrating
• The same data points (hotel address, cancellation policies, room and rate information) had to be requested and re-keyed across multiple forms
• Nothing was centralized; no one had a single source of truth for any given onboarding
• The implementation team had shrunk from six people to four — even as the portfolio grew from 400 to 450 hotels
• Quality-control reviews, integration handoffs, and post-live transitions all lived in different systems and different inboxes

LHW needed a system that could centralize the entire onboarding experience, treat each new hotel as the high-value client it is, and let a leaner team handle a growing book of business without quality slipping.

A Centralized, “OnRampified” Onboarding Experience

With OnRamp, LHW rebuilt the eight-week onboarding from the ground up — every spreadsheet, every form, every internal handoff was, in Ivo’s words, “OnRampified” into a single guided experience.

The new onboarding now provides each hotel a branded self-service portal, complete with:

• A structured, online intake flow that replaces every legacy spreadsheet and Word document
• Embedded video content — including quality-team walkthroughs the hotel can watch rather than just read about
• Centralized internal coordination across the implementation team, brand team, digital support, and quality

Just as important, OnRamp gave LHW the ability to iterate. After running 15 hotels through the new process, the team has already refined their onboarding playbook based on what they learned and what hotels asked for – changes that would have taken months to push through a spreadsheet-based system.

Higher Quality, Happier Hotels, a Leaner Team Doing More

Since going live, LHW has implemented 15 new hotels through the OnRamp-powered playbook — and the early signals are exactly what the team was hoping for:

• 100% of surveyed hotels rated their onboarding experience “satisfied” or “very satisfied”
• Implementation team capacity preserved: four people now manage the workload that previously took six, against a growing portfolio
• Decentralization eliminated: no more spreadsheets passed between teams, no more email chains as the system of record
• Internal demand expanding: revenue enablement, membership, development, and integrations teams are now all building their own playbooks

For LHW, the measure that matters most is quality — and quality starts with the experience the hotel has the moment its membership begins.

One Platform for the Full Member Lifecycle

LHW’s near-term roadmap is about expanding OnRamp from a single playbook into a connected, cross-functional system. The revenue enablement team is preparing its own post-live playbook to take the handoff from implementation. An integration playbook — for connecting hotel PMS and point-of-sale systems to LHW’s central reservation system, Synexis — is queued behind it. And the membership and development teams, who manage the pipeline of new hotel candidates, want to use OnRamp to centralize the pre-onboarding journey as well.

The longer-term vision is the entire five-year member lifecycle in one place: development → onboarding → revenue enablement → renewal. Combined with planned Salesforce automation and Aero AI capabilities like auto-populated fields and Ask Aero — so a hotel never has to re-enter the same information twice — the goal is a single connected experience where every team and every hotel can pick up exactly where the previous step left off.

"Ultimately, we want one full lifecycle inside OnRamp, with every team contributing," says Ivo. "As soon as we finish implementation, it should trigger revenue enablement. As soon as a contract is signed, it should trigger us. That’s what I’d love to see next."