Digital Revolution for the Hospitality Industry?

How would Digital affect a traditional industry such as the hotel business? Well there's certainly potential when looking at what happens today and it goes beyond just a clean up of the myriad of decrepit and unintegrated applications used today.

Starting with the first point in the Customer Journey Map, selecting a hotel, most hotels have their own website and are marketed through a number of web sites or via companies who have block booked groups of rooms within a hotel. (These websites and companies are often referred to as OTAs or on-line travel agents). At least one company, XcelTrip, is deploying Etherium Blockchain to disintermediate the middle men and provide hotels with a greater throw weight, whilst retaining a larger share of revenue for themselves, via a Distributed Travel Environment (DTE). 

Also, Virtual Reality offers a much improved way to experience what the hotel is like before you get there so, not only can you understand what the room and facilities are like, you can also see what the view is like and understand the location in which you would be staying. This should be a great draw, especially for premium hotels offering on site experience or prime locations as a special feature.

Secondly the arrival and process can be greatly improved, especially for frequent travellers and participants in hotel loyalty schemes. If the hotel room has been booked and assigned, there really is no reason for someone to queue at a desk to receive a key. Payment details and identification (e.g. photo or passport) details should already have been captured as part of booking or from stored information within the loyalty scheme database. So it should be more than easy to provide the room details and an access code via text, email or an app used by loyalty scheme members. In this case a traveller can go straight to his or her room, unless a porter is needed. Any final identity checks or validations could easily be carried out by facial recognition as the traveller enters the room.

IoT and the current generation of home automation technology show how much the room iteself can be automated from smart locks, through smart controls for HVAC (Heating, Ventilation, Air Conditioning) provision of voice control for curtains, lights, temperature, locks, TV and entertainment systems and support for AI based translation, so visitors can understand all television channels irrespective of the languages that they use. They also should be able to order room service in the local language via AI translation too. 

Hotels could also consider providing some of the range of digital devices now available to assist in sleep augmentation. (see previous posts). As it has been shown that people do not sleep well in strange environments. Typically on the first night anywhere new, one hemisphere of the brain does not turn off and remains on alert through this first night, leading to less restful sleep.

Other features such as instrumenting the plumbing should make it easy to centrally monitor rooms for problems with leaks etc. and IoT enablement coupled with presence detection should allow for efficiencies to be made in room heating and cooling. Other automation devices such as robot hoovers are a natural application within a building which has a high requirement for daily cleaning and a fixed layout. Operationally, they should contribute to greater room performance and availability. 

Given machine learning's capabilities, it should also be possible to match guest lists with people's cultural backgrounds, previous ordering habits and stated preferences (when booking or entering their details into loyalty scheme systems) to ensure that menus are tailored on a daily basis to what is not only seasonal, but also meets the needs of guests, increasing the likelihood that they will spend on meals within the hotel, rather than going out to dine. Similar principles apply to the stocking of bars and menus for room service.

Delivery of room service meals, drinks and other supplies such as spare tooth brushes can also be effected using RPVs (remote piloted vehicles) for a significant proportion of such transactions. Typically this could shave 15-30 minutes off the wait for a room service request to be fulfilled, doing away with those annoying waits when staff are over stretched.

Checkout, just like check in, could be greatly streamlined. Almost everyone pre-authorises a payment card these days. So the only real issue is dealing with any queries about a billing or  with any complaints as typically 4 out of 5 checkouts are just confirmation of what everyone already knows and receipts can be provided electronically. So if a busy guest just wants to check out, all they should do is enter a swipe out code via an app, and house keeping can immediately add the vacated room to their list.

Finally, a guest's activity during his or her stay, provides a trail of data rich events which can be mined for insight into overall guest behaviour as well as individual tastes and needs, leading to optimisation of future marketing efforts and incentives for repeat business aimed at all customers, specific cohorts or just the individual. This includes increased flexibility in pricing to match capacity, demand and financial yield. Although there are also context based insights for planning refurbishments and room maintenance to fit better into periods where demand is either less intense or less profitable.

So the new hotel is coming, more automated, less frustrating and increasingly tailored to the traveller's needs.