When Travis Pham watched a colleague frantically scribbling notes and snapping photos during a hotel site tour on the North Fork of New York's Long Island in mid-2023, he knew there had to be a better way.
Pham, a former hotel sales executive who had transitioned into the events industry, was conducting the inspection as a member of Meeting Professionals International's board of directors.
"There's a lot of tech in our industry, but it seemed like we were not progressing fast enough and addressing the initial touch point, which is the site inspection," said Pham.
He sought to create a solution, partnering with Javier Valdez, a former senior sales manager with Hilton and owner of travel agency Travel With Myght, and Keith Green, a product developer with experience in the fintech space, to launch the mobile app Happy Sites last year.
The app, which is currently available via Apple's App Store, aims to digitize and better organize site-inspection information and content for meeting planners and travel advisors.
Prior to debuting the app, the trio spent a considerable amount of time interviewing meeting planners and travel advisors to understand their pain points. Top complaints included challenges related to sorting notes and photos from three or four daily site visits and having to manually type everything up at the office.
"When they get back to their desk, they have to digest all that information, type it all up, and then usually save it on a shared drive so that other team members can reference it," explained Pham.
Photo Credit: Happy Sites
Happy Sites addresses these issues through a mobile platform that automatically connects to hotel profiles, which pulls basic property information and photos from platforms like Hotels.com's open-source API. Users can add notes directly to these profiles during tours using either typing or voice-to-text functionality. Notes and other content are organized under categories that are designed to follow typical site-inspection flow, starting with sections for a hotel overview and room inspections to tabs for meetings spaces, catering and destination details.
Notes automatically save and can also be exported as Microsoft Word documents for sharing with team members or integration into client proposals.
Additionally, the app includes a social networking component, which Pham describes as "TripAdvisor meets LinkedIn." Users can opt to connect with other event planners and advisors via the app, sharing property ratings with others within their professional network.
"On our social feed, every time one of your friends goes and does a site inspection, it alerts you, and you can see their overall [thoughts on] a property," said Pham.
Patricia Serrano, owner of the agency Fresh Traveler, was an early adopter of the app.
"Before Happy Sites, I relied heavily on taking photos and videos, then trying to organize them into Google Drive notes," said Serrano, who splits her time between New York and Thailand. "Sometimes, I wouldn't even make notes and just depended on memory. I'd often end up mixing up details."
According to Serrano, the app's guided sections help remind her of key questions to ask during inspections, while the ability to organize photos and videos directly into relevant categories keeps everything structured.
"It saves me time," said Serrano. "It ultimately makes things smoother for the traveler, which is what matters most."
Happy Sites currently has about 400 downloads, with a target of reaching 2,000 users before pursuing funding. The app is free for both advisors and hotels to use, though eventually Happy Sites plans to drive revenue by offering hotels the ability to create enhanced profiles as well as targeted marketing opportunities that could provide hotels with data about which planners are visiting nearby properties.
"If I see that this meeting planner is always going to these luxury resorts in Florida, then I can target all my marketing to this one specific client," said Pham. "Drilling in on the data side of things is going to be valuable for our hotel partners, so that's what we're working on."
Pham and his team are also focused on making ongoing updates to the app based on user feedback as well as building out an advisory committee.
"Once we have that in place, we'll go after angel investors that are interested in the industry and looking for new products that are shaking things up, and eventually the idea is to partner with a larger company, [and join] their suite of products."