LIKE MAGIC review: the simpler guest journey I've been looking for

After my experience with Duve last season, I promised myself something. The next tool I tested would not make Katerina furrow her brow for two hours. Whatever I chose for guest communication this year had to be learnable in a morning, usable by lunch, and second nature by the end of the first week.

A colleague who runs a small design hotel in Thessaloniki mentioned LIKE MAGIC. “Swiss,” she said. “Clean. Not trying to do everything.” That last part got my attention. She also told me about Schani Hotels in Vienna, where they’d seen a 900% rise in digital guest journey adoption and a 30% efficiency gain after switching to the platform. Those numbers sounded almost too good, but they got me curious enough to book a demo.

First morning with Nikos

This year I tried something different. Instead of starting with Katerina (who by now can figure out almost anything I put in front of her), I gave LIKE MAGIC to Nikos. He’s nineteen, studying tourism in Heraklion, and this is his first front desk job. If Nikos can use it, anyone can.

He had the basics within forty-five minutes. The guest journey layout is visual: a timeline running from pre-arrival through stay to checkout, with each stage showing what messages go out and what actions happen. Nikos understood the logic without me explaining it. “It’s like a map,” he said. That’s exactly right.

For comparison, Duve’s dashboard made Katerina (three seasons of experience) ask “where do I even start?” LIKE MAGIC’s interface answered that question before anyone needed to ask it.

WhatsApp is the spine

In Greece, everyone uses WhatsApp. My guests, my staff, my mother, the fisherman who delivers sea bass on Thursdays. LIKE MAGIC treats WhatsApp as the primary communication channel rather than something bolted onto an email system. This matters.

Pre-arrival messages go out via WhatsApp. Guests can do their check-in through WhatsApp. During the stay, they message us on WhatsApp and it lands in the LIKE MAGIC inbox with full context: their name, room number, booking dates, any notes we’ve added. When Maria on the evening shift gets a message asking for extra towels, she sees immediately who’s asking and where they’re staying. No hunting through reservation systems.

The WhatsApp integration also handles the small conversational moments that guests appreciate. An automated “welcome, here’s your digital key” on arrival day. A mid-stay “is everything alright?” that feels personal enough. A checkout reminder with the bill summary. Each one goes through WhatsApp, where the guest already lives, not to an email address they might check tomorrow.

What Swiss design gets right

The interface is restrained. Muted colours, plenty of white space, nothing flashing or demanding attention. There’s a confidence to it. The dashboard shows what you need and hides what you don’t, and the things it hides are accessible without being in your face.

Setting up automated messages took me about an hour. With Duve, the equivalent work consumed an entire evening and two false starts. LIKE MAGIC uses a simpler model: choose the stage of the guest journey, write the message (or edit their template), set the timing. Done. There are fewer options, which means fewer places to make mistakes.

One thing I did notice: I couldn’t fully brand the guest-facing experience with our hotel’s colours and logo the way I’d expected. The messages and check-in pages look clean, but they look like LIKE MAGIC, not like my hotel. For some properties this won’t matter. For a boutique place that cares about visual identity, it’s a gap. A colleague at Schani Hotels told me the same thing.

The digital check-in works cleanly. Guests receive a link, fill in their details, upload their ID if required. The form is short and doesn’t ask for information the booking already provided. I’ve tested tools where the digital check-in form felt longer than checking in at a physical desk. This one doesn’t.

Where it’s still growing

Some features feel early. The upselling module exists but it’s basic compared to what Duve offers. You can add late checkout or a bottle of wine, but the targeting is limited. You can’t say “offer this only to guests staying three nights or more” or “only to guests who booked directly.” For my thirty rooms this is fine. For a larger property trying to optimise upsell revenue, it would be frustrating.

Reporting is thin. I can see message volumes, check-in completion rates, and a few operational metrics. What I can’t easily see is how guest communication connects to revenue. Did the pre-arrival message about our boat tour lead to bookings? I don’t know, and LIKE MAGIC can’t tell me yet.

The PMS integration list is short: Apaleo, Mews, Opera Cloud, and Stayntouch. Four systems, that’s it. I use Mews, so this worked out for me. But if you’re on Cloudbeds, or Little Hotelier, or one of the dozens of other systems common in smaller European hotels, LIKE MAGIC simply won’t connect to your property management system. Check this before you book the demo.

The company originated from SV Group, a major Swiss hospitality conglomerate, and was first built for their own Stay KooooK hotel brand before spinning out as an independent company in 2023. This gives it credibility (they built it for real hotels, not in a vacuum), but it also means some of the best published metrics, like 95% self-check-in rates and running 85 rooms with just 2.5 full-time staff, come from the parent company’s own properties. Not exactly arm’s-length proof.

And pricing. Custom. No published prices on the website. I had to book a call, sit through a demo I didn’t need, and wait for a proposal. Sophie (our numbers person at Six Hoteliers) would have closed the tab. I understand why, but I persisted and the pricing landed in a mid-range I found reasonable. Still, publish it. Let me decide before the demo.

Finding references was hard

When I tried to find other hoteliers using LIKE MAGIC before committing, I hit a wall. Almost nobody outside the DACH region (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) seems to have tried it. My colleague in Thessaloniki was helpful, and the Schani Hotels case study gave me something to go on, but beyond that circle, the references dry up fast. For a small hotel owner in Greece trying to make a confident decision, the lack of people I could talk to about it made me hesitate. I went ahead because the product felt right in the demo, but I was flying on instinct more than evidence.

Switzerland, not the EU

A small point, but one Anna would raise. LIKE MAGIC hosts data on Google Cloud Switzerland, and Swiss data protection falls under both the FADP and GDPR. Switzerland isn’t in the EU, but the dual coverage means your guests’ data gets strong protection from both frameworks. For most practical purposes this is at least as good as any EU member state, possibly better given Switzerland’s reputation. Anna would still want to review the specifics for her own properties. For my purposes, Zurich feels safe enough.

One thing I learned later: LIKE MAGIC’s AI features run through a company called D3x AI, based in Covina, California. D3x describes their approach as “dynamic LLM-switching,” which means they pick different AI models depending on the task. That sounds smart, but it also means guest queries from my Greek resort could be processed through any number of AI providers in the US, and I have no visibility into which one handles what. The Swiss hosting applies to LIKE MAGIC’s own systems, but the AI layer sits in America. Anna was not pleased when I mentioned this.

What Nikos said at the end of the week

I asked him on Friday. “It’s easy,” he said. “I don’t think about it anymore, I just use it.” From a nineteen-year-old in his first hotel job, after five days, that’s the best review I can give any piece of software.

It’s not perfect. It’s not as powerful as Duve. But for a seasonal operation where staff turnover is a fact of life and training time is measured in hours, LIKE MAGIC gets the balance closer to right than anything else I’ve tried.