You can Google all you want, but no one is going to tell you that the Oak Bluffs harbor is dead tonight and you should head to the Ritz instead. After all, local is as local does.
That’s the idea behind an unusual virtual concierge service offered at the Dockside Inn, where hotel owner John Tiernan connects guests with real-time local advice. Once checked in, guests receive a number to which they can text questions, everything from how to get to Aquinnah to where to find late night grub. The program is called Loomis, and the answers come back from a select group of paid, experienced Island regulars, recruited by Tiernan. He fondly refers to the team as his “Loomi.”
Tiernan, who has deep family ties to Oak Bluffs and moved here full time in 2002, bought the Dockside with a partner in 2012 and quickly turned the formerly dilapidated hotel on Circuit Avenue extension into one of the most popular inns on the Island. The idea for the service, however, came to Tiernan one day in Boston when “at a very nice hotel” he asked the concierge where he could get a burger. She started Googling. “I said, ‘I can Google,’” he recalled. “‘I want to know where you would go.’ She goes, ‘Well, I don’t live here.’”
“I thought, there’s gotta be a way to text locals and they can answer it.” Loomis, named after the head caddy in the movie Caddyshack, was born.
“The most important part of it is, you feel like a local here because you’re asking real people,” he said. Being real people, the answers vary, which Tiernan likes. “The truth behind Loomis is it might be me one day and you the next. You’ll get different answers and everybody has a different idea.” But the identity of the Loomi are kept strictly confidential. “Everybody tries to guess who Loomis is, I don’t even tell my friends,” he says.
Last year Loomis received a technology innovation award from the Massachusetts Lodging Association, beating out the likes of the Mandarin Oriental hotel on Boylston Street in Boston. “They had a million dollar in-room entertainment system that was up against Loomis, which is basically a cell phone,” he says. “I’m absolutely amazed that no one has done it before.”
Looking forward, Tiernan hopes the program can be sold to other hotel companies. “I’m a salesman, I was a salesman before I got into this business, I want to be a salesman again someday and I want to sell Loomis,” he said. “I want to bring it to the hotel show in Las Vegas and say, here’s why you should do it: I’m a hotelier, I’ve done this, I’m successful in the business and this is why my guests love it.”
Text local, as they say. Sell global.
