There are many different facets of Wander’s business, from reception to their restaurant Gather. The restaurant and beach club serve the public as well as guests, and they’ve had to confront the costs associated with that. “We have to have our kitchen fully staffed, our front of house fully staffed, regardless of whether or not we may have a full onslaught of bookings,” says Molly McRea, Wander’s director of rooms. “It can be very difficult to manage and keep that cost under control.”

Food prices, labor and the rising cost of living have all put stress on Wander’s delicate balancing act between profitability and spending. Plus, their old system’s confusing fees didn’t help. "One of the challenges that we had was that we were having a really hard time understanding what our monthly fees were with our old system,” McRea says. Ultimately, all of these challenges pointed to the need for streamlining. Wander urgently required a point of sale system that integrated with Cloudbeds, their hotel PMS.

After researching multiple POS systems that integrate with Cloudbeds, Lightspeed stood out to McRea. “Lightspeed is a really easy way to streamline everything,” she says. It’s allowed Wander to connect all elements of the business to maximize their revenue streams, manage costs and increase efficiency. McRea touts her immediate comfortability with the system as one of her reasons for choosing Lightspeed: “I instantly felt it was very familiar to me. I was like, this clearly had someone behind it that has worked in hospitality before. I can see that I can easily move through this program.”

With Lightspeed Restaurant and Lightspeed Payments, the cost savings are considerable. Guests can now order directly from the restaurant in their cabins. Diners and staff alike enjoy a seamless checkout experience with Pay at Table. For high-volume events, they now have the ability to run one large tab. And with integrations like Opentable, McRea can monitor active tables and see how much guests are spending.

Another big bonus? “Lightspeed was able to offer us lower [payment processing] rates and it's been a few hundred dollars [in] savings each month,” says McRea.

Wander has streamlined their entire business. “We’ve been able to increase our offerings because of Lightspeed. And it’s just made everything so much more cohesive,” says McRea. This change has fueled revenue growth across the business. “Our revenue is increasing year-over-year right now because we have the ability to keep adding all of these offerings in.”

With Lightspeed Payments, staff turn tables faster, reducing transaction processing time at Gather to around 20 seconds. “Having the Pay at Table function, it’s just an invaluable thing on any debit terminal,” says McRea. Reconciliation has also become much faster. McRea went from spending around 4-5 hours a day on reconciliation to 2 hours a week.

Cost-saving measures are important for an operation as intricate as Wander’s. Due to Lightspeed’s sales data and information related to employee performance, McRea says they’ve “been able to look at the numbers coming in from staff and make decisions … mostly where to reduce. We’ve been able to use that to manage our labor costs.” The data also allows them to track menu trends and make food-related expense decisions.