Scaling a hospitality tech onboarding team without adding headcount
When FLYR Hospitality's onboarding manager Laya Janssens made the case internally for a new system, she built it around five words: scalability, professionalism, efficiency, accountability, tracking. Here's what changed after she got the greenlight.
Introduction
FLYR Hospitality builds revenue and distribution software for hotels. Their customers range from small independents to complex enterprise chains — and every one of them needs to be onboarded onto a technical platform before the software earns its keep.
For a long time, the team ran that process the way most scaling B2B companies do: on email, with a few Google Sheets for the larger customers and an internal Notion wiki to keep the onboarders themselves aligned. It worked, in the sense that customers eventually went live. But it scaled linearly — every new customer added a proportional weight to the onboarding team, and that team wasn't growing at the same rate as the customer base.
Laya Janssens, FLYR Hospitality's Onboarding Manager, could see the inflection point coming. Before she asked her leadership for a new tool, she wrote down exactly why the existing setup couldn't take them another year. Five pillars. That internal slide became the spine of the argument — and, in retrospect, the cleanest description of what breaks when you try to run modern B2B onboarding on email.
The existing stack couldn't absorb an influx of small and mid-sized customers, and it buckled under the complexity of large enterprise onboardings. Every new project added a proportional load to the team.
The team now runs roughly 50 onboardings in parallel and launched 68 projects last month. Repeatable content — configuration walkthroughs, pricing theory videos — is embedded directly in the customer's project so smaller customers self-serve through portions of the setup. Larger customers get broader visibility and more points of contact inside their own organization without adding CSM hours.
Customer-facing onboarding lived in Google Sheets, manual email follow-ups, and Word forms. A newly-closed enterprise deal would leave the commercial process feeling polished and immediately drop into something that didn't match.
Every customer lands in a branded project workspace with clean tasks, embedded videos and forms, and no login required. They can view progress as a list, a Gantt chart, or a dashboard. Critically, they don't get flooded with marketing email from a system they didn't ask to join — the workspace is purely operational.
Work was spread across email, Slack, Jira, and Notion. The seams between those tools were where things fell through — missed handoffs, duplicated asks, slow decisions.
Task reminders and status workflows are automated. Onboard.io's global tasks and variables approach — instead of static templates — means when FLYR Hospitality changes a procedure or ships a new integration, the onboarding playbook can be updated once and applied across every active project. Each team member now saves roughly five hours a week on coordination overhead.
All responsibility lived with the onboarder. If a customer went quiet, the CSM chased. If the CSM was overloaded, projects slipped. The process was only as reliable as the individual running it.
Customers are empowered to onboard themselves and their team members, and CSMs can see progress at a glance. On the internal side, every CSM follows the same standardized procedure — customized per customer via variables, rather than reinvented per CSM based on past experience. That's the change that matters most: the process now survives personnel changes.
Project status lived in HubSpot notes and in the CSM's head. There was no reliable way to identify which tasks, phases, or integration types were slowing things down across the portfolio.
Weekly updates on active onboardings post automatically to Slack. Time-per-task and time-per-phase data is exportable for deeper analysis, and an open API makes a Looker integration possible. For the first time, the team can answer "where are we losing time?" with evidence instead of intuition.
“Onboard.io has transformed the way we manage customer onboarding—giving our team full visibility and accountability while empowering customers to track their own progress every step of the way.”
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Email threads as the primary customer channel
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Google Sheets for multi-project enterprise accounts
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Word forms for customer-provided configuration data
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Notion for internal onboarding playbooks (not customer-facing)
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HubSpot notes as the source of truth for project status
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Slack and Jira for internal handoffs
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CSM memory for everything in between
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Branded Onboard.io workspace per customer
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Embedded video content and intake forms
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Global tasks + variables replace brittle templates
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Automated task reminders and status workflows
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Customer-visible progress in list, Gantt, or dashboard view
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Automated Slack digests on active projects
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Exportable time-per-task data, open API for BI tools
“One of our customers said it was the best onboarding experience they'd had with a hotel tech company."
Conclusion
That line came from Laya's form response, almost as an afterthought. It's the kind of signal most CS leaders will recognize instantly. Onboarding is usually where the post-sale relationship either builds trust or spends it. For a hotel tech buyer evaluating vendors, the experience of getting live on the product is a direct proxy for the experience of being a customer long-term.
Ask Laya why FLYR Hospitality uses Onboard.io, and she'll tell you the software is intuitive and customizable, the coordination overhead drops, and the development team is responsive to feedback. Ask what her team actually gets out of it, and the answer is simpler: each CSM can carry more customers without the quality of the onboarding getting worse. That is the metric that decides whether an onboarding org scales — or caps out.
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