What a real guest stay reveals about your property.

Playbooks delivers confidential Experience Audits and AI Visibility reviews for luxury hotels and resorts, built from real guest stays. We test the full journey under genuine conditions — including the complex stays standard mystery shopping doesn't reach.

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Recommended by General Managers

What hotel leaders say.

"
Your thoughtful recommendations not only guide us toward better service delivery but also help elevate our visibility in the marketplace. I am especially grateful for the extra step you took in analyzing online reviews and connecting them with your own experiences.
Eric Kee
General Manager
InterContinental Hangzhou
"
It is rare to receive feedback that is so meticulous and thoughtfully examined from such a wide range of perspectives. We will make every effort to utilize this valuable material as we continue striving to create even better guest experiences.
Jake Lee
General Manager
InterContinental Seoul Parnas
Global luxury hospitality benchmark

44 cities, audited in person. All luxury 5-star properties.

21Countries
44Cities
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Tokyo Kyoto Osaka Hong Kong Montreal Boston Denver Amsterdam Barcelona Valletta Berlin Zurich Prague Budapest Copenhagen Rome Beijing Shanghai Ho Chi Minh City Bangkok Chiang Mai Koh Samui Bali Marseille Toronto · NYC San Francisco Paris · London Seoul Hong Kong Singapore Hawaii
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44 Cities audited in person
21 Countries across 3 regions
14 days Report delivered after the stay
What every engagement includes

Two audits. One clear view.

Every engagement combines both — because you can't separate the guest experience from the way AI and review platforms describe it to your next guest.

01
Pillar A · Experience & 2026 Design

Stay-in. Detail-out.

We conduct a 5–7 night hosted stay and evaluate your guest experience from arrival through departure — every touchpoint, on the record, documented against a structured framework.

  • ·Arrival, lobby, check-in — first impression through settling in
  • ·Room, housekeeping, turn-down, maintenance
  • ·F&B across every outlet and meal period
  • ·Club Lounge, spa, pool, gym, facilities
  • ·Service recovery, staff warmth, anticipation
Confidential report delivered within 14 days
02
Pillar B · AI Visibility & Discovery

How AI sees you.

We map exactly where you appear across LLMs and the editorial layer they cite — then build the strategy to own it.

  • ·LLM visibility — ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, AI Overviews
  • ·Review sentiment — TripAdvisor, Booking, Google, social
  • ·Editorial & creator strategy — the sources AI cites
  • ·Schema, structured content & technical SEO
  • ·Competitor benchmark (3 nearby luxury 5★)
  • ·90-day implementation + quarterly tracking
chatgpt.com
Best 5-star luxury hotels in Hangzhou?
InterContinental Hangzhou — A landmark waterfront property on West Lake. Notably attentive Club Lounge service, refined Chinese kitchen, and a concierge team praised for personalization.
Paired with every Experience Audit
A growing share of luxury travel discovery begins in AI — and most hotels haven't optimised for it. · We map exactly where your property stands.
The framework

What we evaluate.

Our audits assess the full luxury guest journey across every operational and experiential touchpoint — from pre-arrival through departure. The goal is not to rate the property for public consumption. The goal is to give leadership an outside view of what is working, what is inconsistent, and what will affect loyalty, reviews, and repeat visits.

01

Arrival & Check-In

  • Pre-arrival communication and room readiness
  • Welcome experience and first impression
  • Check-in friction, speed, and warmth
  • Recognition of children and companions without reducing the luxury standard
  • Proactive amenity and property orientation
02

Room & In-Room Experience

  • Room condition, cleanliness, and maintenance
  • Temperature control and sleep environment
  • In-room amenities and welcome detail
  • Housekeeping consistency across the stay
  • Room readiness, connecting-room handling, bedding, and configuration flexibility
03

Food & Beverage

  • Breakfast quality, variety, and execution
  • Club Lounge service and curation
  • Dietary adaptability and service responsiveness
  • Service timing and staff attentiveness
  • Kitchen cleanliness and preparation standards
04

Facilities & Amenities

  • Pool, club, spa, and amenity usability for guests travelling with children or companions
  • Gym and wellness facility standards
  • Lounge and communal space quality
  • Overnight cleaning standards across all spaces
  • Luggage handling and operational logistics
05

Service Intelligence

  • Staff warmth, anticipation, and personalization
  • Recovery quality when something goes wrong
  • Consistency across departments and shifts
  • Cultural sensitivity and adaptability
  • Concierge initiative and local knowledge
06

AI & Digital Visibility

  • LLM rankings across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini
  • Review sentiment across Google, TripAdvisor, Booking
  • Editorial and creator citation coverage
  • Competitive visibility against your luxury set
  • Content gaps and improvement opportunities

This is not influencer work. Nothing is published. The audit report is delivered exclusively to the property and shared only with stakeholders you designate.

How to engage

A hosted audit, complete on its own.

Every engagement begins with a 5–7 night hosted Experience Audit and a comprehensive report. That's a complete piece of work.

Where every engagement begins The Hosted Experience Audit

A 360° report, board-grade.

We conduct a 5–7 night hosted stay as real guests, moving through the full journey from arrival to departure: reservation, check-in, room, housekeeping, F&B, club, spa, concierge, pool, service recovery, billing, and departure. Where relevant, audits are conducted under genuine family-stay conditions, allowing us to evaluate how the property supports high-value guests travelling with children — changing schedules, dietary needs, amenity usage, and room-configuration requirements.

You receive a detailed section-by-section report and prioritised recommendations. A leadership review session can be added when useful for the GM, owner, or board.

  • 5–7 night hosted stay · real guests, on the record
  • Every touchpoint evaluated against a structured framework
  • Board-ready report · section-by-section · prioritised recommendations
  • Report delivered within 14 days · optional leadership review available
  • Confidential — never published, never shared externally
Host us — start here →
The 360° Playbook
Section 01 — 15
  • Arrival & check-in
  • Room & turn-down
  • F&B service
  • Club & lounge
  • Spa & wellness
  • Departure & recovery
  • Competitive set
  • AI visibility findings
Prioritised recommendations · Board-ready

A full report in your hands within 14 days of the visit. The playbook for what to fix, what to keep, what to invent.

Optional implementation support

Need help implementing the recommendations?

The audit is complete on its own. For teams that want help acting on the online, marketing, content, AI visibility, or digital product recommendations, Playbooks can stay involved as the implementation partner, so you are not left finding a separate agency after the report.

AI Visibility & Search

LLM visibility, schema, review surfaces, editorial citations.

Digital & Guest Experience

Site and app flows, digital touchpoints, guest journey design.

Content & Growth

Creator strategy, owned content, campaign assets, measurement.

Multi-property · Enterprise
Running 4+ properties? We scale with you — and the per-property investment goes down.
Request enterprise pricing → Tiered for portfolios · Pricing shared during the conversation
Why it matters

What internal teams stop seeing.

Strong hotels still develop blind spots. Teams normalize repeated friction, work around operational gaps, and often hear about problems only after they appear in public reviews — or in AI search results recommending a competitor instead.

An independent audit gives leadership a controlled version of that outside perspective before it becomes a reputation issue.

  • 1
    Identify recurring friction before it reaches public reviews. Small operational gaps compound — what staff normalize, guests remember and write about.
  • 2
    Separate isolated incidents from systemic patterns. A report built from a real 5–7 night stay, across multiple departments, shows you what's structural versus what's a one-off.
  • 3
    Understand how your AI and review presence compares to competitors. Your guests are using AI to choose their next luxury stay. We show you exactly where you stand.
  • 4
    Prioritize by guest impact, not internal politics. The report ranks recommendations by what will most affect loyalty, reviews, and repeat visits.
Good to know

How it works.

What happens during the hosted Experience Audit?
We conduct a 5–7 night hosted stay as real guests, moving through the full journey: reservation, check-in, room, housekeeping, F&B, club, spa, concierge, pool, service recovery, billing, and departure — on the record. Where relevant, stays are conducted under genuine family-travel conditions. You receive a detailed section-by-section report within two weeks, with an optional leadership review with the GM, ownership, or designated department heads.
Do we have to keep working with you after the audit?
No. The hosted Experience Audit and 360° report are complete on their own. Optional implementation support is available for teams that want help with AI visibility, digital guest experience, content, or growth recommendations.
How long does an engagement typically take?
The report is delivered within two weeks of the final night. Optional implementation work is scoped separately after the audit, depending on what the leadership team wants to act on.
What does the deliverable look like?
A document structured chronologically through the guest journey. Each section pairs observed detail with specific, prioritised recommendations, benchmarked against your local luxury set. If you ask us to implement selected recommendations, that work is scoped separately with its own plan and deliverables.
Is the audit confidential?
Always. Deliverables are shared only with your GM and the stakeholders you designate.
Is this the same as a mystery shopper service?
No. Mystery shopping services use contracted evaluators on short visits following a standardised script. Our audits are conducted as genuine guest stays across 5–7 nights, evaluated against a structured framework specific to luxury properties — including the complex conditions created by premium family travel that standard evaluators rarely test. The result is operational intelligence and AI visibility analysis, not a compliance checklist.
How does pricing work?
Pricing is always shared in conversation. Every property is different, every brief is different, and the right number depends on scope. The hosted audit is a complete piece of work and priced on its own.
Do you work with multi-property groups?
Yes. We're set up for portfolios — three properties or thirty. Per-property investment goes down as the count goes up, and we run audits in parallel where calendars allow.
How do we get started?
Send a short note from the form below. We respond within two business days with a window for the hosted audit and a short questionnaire about your property. That's the whole on-ramp.
Start with the audit

Commission a confidential audit.

Tell us about your property. Direct to the founders. Always.