IHG Hotels & Resorts, one of the world’s largest hotel companies with more than 6,800 properties, wanted to give guests a simple, contactless digital checkout experience across its entire portfolio. Guests were asking for quicker departures, fewer lines, and a friendly mobile-first flow that matched the rest of their digital habits. But turning that vision into reality wasn’t easy as IHG operates across multiple PMS platforms, regions, and legacy configurations with different batch processes. To make digital checkout truly self-service, IHG needed real-time reservation and folio data directly from each hotel. 

Europe added another challenge. Countries like the UK and Germany require guest folios to follow strict tax and formatting rules. Any digital checkout tool had to create these folios instantly and correctly, without country-specific logic.

And finally, the new experience had to work inside IHG’s existing mobile app and website without requiring any rebuild.

IHG partnered with Hapi to build a modern connection layer that brings real-time communication between central systems and property-level PMS data.

Hapi’s Data Streams and Finders & Agents acted as the bridge, giving IHG’s app and website a direct way to complete digital checkouts across different PMS versions and configurations, including Oracle OPERA v5, OPERA Cloud, and HotelKey.

Together, Hapi and IHG:

• Used Hapi’s kiosk APIs to let the IHG mobile app and website confirm checkout eligibility and complete the process instantly.
• Set smart business rules to make sure guests only saw digital checkout when their folio was ready and within the valid checkout window.
• Reviewed and updated OPERA Web Services (OWS) settings across thousands of properties so each hotel could interact smoothly with the centralized experience.
• Designed a future-friendly approach that didn’t require any changes to IHG’s app, reducing extra development for internal teams.