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There’s something special about operating a hotel on Mackinac Island, Michigan. Every spring, Chippewa Hotel Waterfront and Lilac Tree Suites come back to life, welcoming families, vacationers, and small groups for another busy season.
For these two independently owned hotels, that seasonality brings a unique operational challenge. During peak season, the properties grow to a team of approximately 250 employees—compared with a smaller crew during the off-season.
Keeping that many people, rooms and moving parts coordinated takes more than great hospitality. It takes technology that can keep up.
The hotels have relied on Chorum PMS for over eight years. Today, Chorum helps the team streamline operations across both properties, get seasonal employees up to speed, keep housekeeping and maintenance moving in real time, manage groups and deliver the personalized service their returning guests expect.
We spoke with Bart Berkshire, Front Office Manager, about how Jonas Chorum helps the properties stay organized and connected throughout the season, from reservations and guest management to housekeeping and maintenance.
With two boutique hotels operating in the same destination, consistency is essential. Jonas Chorum gives the Chippewa Hotel and Lilac Tree Suites a standardized way of working while still allowing each property to maintain its unique room categories, layouts, and configurations.
“Our properties operate independently, and Chorum gives us consistency in how we manage things,” explains Bart. “Having the same processes and tools at both properties makes it easier for our teams to work efficiently. If someone needs to cover the desk at the other property, they can head over and get started without additional training.”
During their busy season, this gives their team some much needed flexibility.
The result is a more flexible workforce and a smoother way to cover shifts during a busy season. What’s more, as a seasonal property, getting a large team trained and ready for opening day is a major undertaking. Chippewa Hotel and Lilac Tree Suites begin onboarding their seasonal employees in April, while they are living in disparate locations off the island.
The cloud-based nature of the system as well as Chorum’s extensive resources makes it easy to include the PMS as part of their two weeks of virtual training before staff arrive on Mackinac Island. By the time they arrive, staff have already logged into the system and learned the ins and outs.
“With it being a cloud-based system, it works out really well,” Bart explains. “The layout of everything, it looks appealing. It’s intuitive, it makes sense for staff and makes it easy to navigate for day-to-day tasks.”
For a hotel that needs to onboard a large seasonal workforce every year, that accessibility makes a meaningful difference.
With hundreds of employees working across the properties during peak season, communication between departments needs to happen quickly.
They rely heavily on Chorum’s mobile app as well as Message Manager within it to keep housekeeping, maintenance, and the front desk connected. Housekeepers can log room requests directly, while maintenance teams can receive and respond to issues without relying on paper notes or verbal messages.
The system also creates a record of when issues are logged and when they are resolved.
That can be particularly valuable when a room needs to be turned around quickly. For example, if housekeeping discovers a carpet that needs to be cleaned between guests, the team can immediately communicate the issue and dispatch the appropriate employee.
“We're definitely saving time, saving paper, all that kind of stuff,” says Bart. “Between small requests and quick emergency fixes, having good communication is so important. It automatically creates a log without needing a physical paper trail, so we have a historical record to refer to.”
For boutique properties with many repeat visitors, knowing a guest's preferences is essential to making guests happy.
They use the robust guest profile sections on Chorum PMS to record preferences and requests from returning guests. Many of their repeat guests request the same room year after year because it has sentimental significance for their family.
Others have recurring requests that the team can anticipate before they arrive. For example, a guest who regularly requests wine glasses in their room during every visit now can just find those glasses in their room because it’s on their profile.
The more the team uses Chorum PMS, the more valuable that historical information becomes.
“Because we have a lot of guests who come back year after year, we want to make sure we can provide that same great experience every time they visit,” Bart explains. “Keeping detailed notes about their preferences helps us get ahead of their needs, whether that’s assigning their preferred room or having something they always request ready for them before they arrive. It’s those little details that help create that traditional, personalized feel when they come back.”
While summer is dominated by families and leisure travelers, Chippewa Hotel and Lilac Tree Suites also welcome tour groups during the shoulder seasons in May and October.
Jonas Chorum helps the team manage multiple groups at once by allowing them to upload rooming lists, access group profiles, and maintain detailed staff notes.
When a group calls with a question or requests an update, staff can review the notes associated with that group and quickly see what has already been discussed.
“It's always good to keep detailed notes,” Bart says.
That centralized information helps the team stay organized when multiple groups are arriving and departing around the same time.
The Chippewa Hotel team also relies heavily on Chorum's reporting capabilities. Reservation forecasts are reviewed almost daily and discussed during weekly department-head meetings to help the team anticipate occupancy and staffing needs. One of the biggest benefits of moving away from paper-based processes and an older, on-premise system has been having important information in one centralized place.
That’s particularly valuable when the team is managing multiple groups, returning guests, and hundreds of seasonal employees. Staff can upload group rooming lists, access group profiles, and use staff notes to keep track of conversations and requests. When a group calls with a question or an update, the team can review the notes and quickly see what has already been discussed rather than relying on memory or searching through paperwork.
“We have always kept detailed notes,” explains Bart. “Now we have them in one place.”
Chorum also gives the team a centralized record of day-to-day operational activity. Staff notes can be reviewed through reports, while reservation forecasts, guest lists, emergency reports, night audit reports, and deposit due sheets give the team quick access to the information they need to run the properties.
“The more we use Jonas Chorum, the more benefit we're seeing long term from it.”
Chorum’s robust reports is essential to the hotel’s day-to-day operations. Reservation forecasts help the team anticipate occupancy and determine staffing needs, while the concierge team uses it to plan luggage schedules around expected arrivals and departures. Easily accessible guest lists are particularly important on an island property with occasional emergency response needs, as it gives the team a quick view of who is in-house, arriving, and departing. Night audit reports and deposit-due sheets support daily operations.
“I don't know if there's a report that honestly we don't use,” Bart says. The team has also created many of their own custom saved reports when the standard options don’t cover a specific need, then have those reports automatically sent by email through Message Manager or keep them readily accessible from their Chorum login.
It becomes a shared record of what the team has learned: information that can be accessed, built upon, and put to use season after season.
For Chippewa Hotel and Lilac Tree Suites, the value of Chorum goes beyond simply making daily operations easier. It gives their team a shared, accessible record of the information that helps them deliver a more personal guest experience. From guest preferences and past requests to maintenance updates and staff notes, the more information the team captures, the more useful it becomes. Memorable guest experiences start with the right tools to help staff deliver them.
For independent or seasonal hotels considering a new PMS, Bart says the ease of use, training resources, and communication tools make the difference.
“Training, you’re going to save a lot of time,” he explains. “And just getting everybody and all the staff on the app is so helpful. You're going to be able to improve that communication quite a bit. Having everything in the cloud, knowing that it's always there and you don't have to worry about losing anything is such a peace of mind.”
For a seasonal hotel, that peace of mind goes a long way. With Chorum, Chippewa Hotel and Lilac Tree Suites can spend less time chasing information and more time doing what they do best: taking care of their guests.
