Hotels welcome travelers across all continents and budgets accounting for a $600 billion industry. Massive hotel development, especially in Asia, is also creating the opportunity to re-define lodging standards and the overall guest experience leveraging fully integrated smart technology that integrates with building systems in the design phase.
As the next-generation of business travelers and tourists arrive to their destinations, one thing is certain, technology is at their finger-tips.
As a lodging professional, it’s time to ensure you are taking advantage of technology to work with the lifestyle your new customers have adopted. If you can’t ask yourself how a smartphone integrates with your hotel business, today is the time to ask those hard questions and to start coming up with solutions that are mobile. If you still have that clunky iPOD player from the early 2000’s making your house cleaning staff do extra dusting each day, the following insight is necessary for your business to evolve.
At the 2019 Driving the Future of Hospitality conference sponsored by Intel in Da Nang, Vietnam, numerous companies presented their solutions and everyone of them made it clear, tech is in and there is big money at stake for brands that do not evolve to meet consumer preferences.
Highlights of the conference focused on technology and Internet of Things (IOT) in how smart devices can integrate between the customer, management, hardware, and existing systems.
One company had an impressive technology solution that incorporated building system design with HVAC temperature control to customized alarms instead of wake-up calls on the customer’s cell phone to facial recognition that ensures VIP guests are taken care of if they appear upset while standing in line to on-demand room service teamed up with robots.
Surveillance cameras are also being used as a portal for hotel brands to learn where people spend their time and what patterns people have in order to create premium guest experiences with heat mapping technology that offers digital insights on human behavior. One company is taking a proactive approach to addressing the fear of surveillance by making cameras the size of tennis balls.
On the sustainability front, guests will also have the option to visit self-serve vending machines to order more soap, toothbrushes, etc. and have them delivered to their room via robots at convenient hours. Green is in, so sharing how you leverage sustainability and technology is a key piece to any hotel’s marketing efforts.
Technology improvements help hotel owners and management teams to reduce labor costs through improving operational efficiencies as well. In the traditional check-out model, some guests go to the front desk to check-out while others leave without notice. Sometimes, guests don’t leave their rooms for whatever reason and are bothered by the knock of house cleaners trying to do their job. The process in most hotels is not as efficient as it could be. Self-checkout features through apps also allow guests more control over how they use the hotel and give management real-time insight to offer late check-outs for a nominal fee to knowing the perfect time to deliver that rose petal surprise for those honeymooners.
Whether you are designing a new hotel or improving an existing location, ensure that you spend some time to research the numerous technology solutions that are available today to make the guest experience one that gets top reviews across digital sites to beat your competition in addition to offering valuable insights to improve operations.
If you need help implementing a new strategy that incorporates technology, marketing customer experiences, and exceeding operational goals, feel free to send me an email today to have a conversation about your business needs.
CONFERENCE HIGHLIGHT VIDEO BELOW
