Despite all the new trends such as staycations and the desire for activities related to physical distancing, hotels are still under pressure to give guests a remarkable reason to visit over what all these other players have to offer. Besides technology’s ability to boost team productivity and tighten the purse strings, devices and their supportive software are now a lucrative means by which to maintain a hotel’s relevancy amongst customers.

This is why HITEC is perennially my favorite tradeshow of the year. Postponed until the final week of October due to the coronavirus, this convention gives hoteliers a glimpse into what the future holds for their properties while also providing a clear and present solution for many of our woes – nowadays the foremost of those being the need for software to facilitate enhanced cleanliness protocols, social distancing, contact tracing and better interdepartmental communications.

In this particular instance, let’s focus on how you can deploy various technologies to increase the guestroom experience, especially now that the internet of things has become instrumental for maintaining service delivery while limiting in-person contact with onsite staff.

Part of my job as an asset management consultant for hotel properties is to evaluate technology vendors to then decide which will have a meaningful impact on back-of-house operations and the front-of-use guest experience. Needless to say, Covid has amplified the need for connected management software to the nth degree. To this end, I’ve sat in on demos for a fair share of IoT devices that can advance the in-room experience so as to compensate for a lack of person-to-person interactions.

Besides the push for new energy and water management systems that can save big on overall utility costs, when it comes to what visitors see and interact with, I’m still looking for that wow factor. Technology can help you maintain that irreplaceable charm that was previously offered by your teams who were trained to deliver service with a smile.

To truly impress guests with your in-room technology nowadays, though, you cannot proceed in a one-off manner or simply offer a bandaged solution to the challenges presented by the coronavirus. That is, one new device isn’t going to leave an enduring impression because it won’t appear as wholly embodying your brand’s theme as a purveyor of guestrooms that ostensibly better than a home.

Instead, you must make this a semi-perennial investment with a team in place to devise the rollout plan for each successive feature installation. With a solid strategy, you would then go about setting up a cluster of IoT-enabled amenities that together will let you market the rooms as unquestionably progressive and tech-forward while also delivering a meaningful experience once guests arrive.

The other fear is that, with hotels all over the world experimenting with customer-facing IoT integrations, these features may soon lose their marketing pizzazz or, worse, become the expectation where you are then compelled to play catchup. Looking beyond any base requirements for viral safety, for these front-of-house upgrades, you can consider phone-enabled lighting, motorized drapes or blinds, smart thermostats, door locks and door sensors with “Do Not Disturb” features. Many of these also tangentially benefit your housekeepers because these infer fewer physical touchpoints in the room.

These are relatively simple additions, but the added benefit is that they can inevitably help with operational efficiency. For instance, a DND control through a guest’s phone will one day not only cause a light to ping in the hallway to notify passing room attendants but also send a notification straight through to the housekeeping management software’s admin dashboard so virtual task boards can be seamlessly adjusted. And vice versa for when that DND is switched off to indicate that the guest has left his or her room.

While smart thermostats are already widely recognized as a proven means of reducing the energy bill by helping correct the needless temperature modulation of a vacant room, such prearrival control functions also help increase comfort, maintenance scheduling efficiency and, eventually, security as only a registered phone signal will be allowed access to given rooms or floors. As previously implied, with most of these IoT controls synced to the guest’s phone, BYOD (bring your own device) will mean an easier post-checkout sanitization job by your room attendants.

The overarching idea here is to give travelers a reason to yearn to stay in one of your rooms versus all the other options that one can find on the internet. Some hotels achieve this through outstanding artwork, décor or interior design. Others do it through impeccable service or F&B. Technological installation should be one more tool in your arsenal and for that I would highly recommend you attend this year’s postponed HITEC in San Antonio then start evaluating your options in advance of the budgetary planning cycle for 2021.

One of the world’s most published writers in hospitality, Larry Mogelonsky is the principal of Hotel Mogel Consulting Limited, a Toronto-based consulting practice. His experience encompasses hotel properties around the world, both branded and independent, and ranging from luxury and boutique to select-service. Larry is also on several boards for companies focused on hotel technology. His work includes five books, “Are You an Ostrich or a Llama?” (2012), “Llamas Rule” (2013), “Hotel Llama” (2015), “The Llama is Inn” (2017) and “The Hotel Mogel” (2018). You can reach Larry at larry@hotelmogel.com to discuss hotel business challenges or to book speaking.

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With physical distancing and contact tracing becoming the new normal, hoteliers can no longer pay lip service to this medium. The coronavirus has accelerated the trend of making a guest’s phone the primary point of communication to the hotel’s staff, and as such we all need to devote our resources to make the mobile experience frictionless and omnipresent.

It’s always interesting to consider how you can alter your on-property services and upstream product messaging to capitalize upon this profound paradigm shift. Think beyond the required messaging apps for services provided by the onsite staff. In a mobile-everything world, hoteliers must think of ways to amplify their hotel experiences purely through digital means and without the time-honored ability to ingratiate yourself with customers via in-person “service with a smile.”

One question can perhaps summarize this dilemma succinctly: how is your concierge better than a Google search? That is to say, for a guest who is adept at finding and arranging whatever they want via their mobile devices what is the value-add of having a dedicated concierge? Extrapolate this out to numerous other functions that the average smartphone performs and you can easily see how modern travelers may be apathetic to many of the services you tout as features to help sell rooms.

Wake up calls or guestroom alarm clocks? Not only do phones perform this task satisfactorily – and now also in a more sanitized manner – but there are specific memory functions built within these devices to remember a person’s typical sleep cycle. And as for getting directions, restaurant recommendations or local area information, there are a bevy of apps or third-party websites with user reviews to inform visitors as to what’s best in the area. All your guests need from you is fast WiFi and they are accustomed, nay entertained, by doing the rest of the process themselves. This DIY nature of mobile everything behavior does not engender guests to view your hotel as any different than the competition.

And yet, these services are still promoted as key selling points on brand.com websites and the OTAs, even though the average post-Covid traveler would feel far safer attaining these things from their own phones thus rendering the features irrelevant. From the guest’s point of view, they now have no tangible benefit to differentiate your product, and so you must adapt these services accordingly.

In rethinking what you offer thorough your onsite hotel experience so that it actually has an emotional impact on mobile-first guests, remember that anything Google can do, you should not try to compete with. Retraining of your concierge and front desk means you should look to exclusive deals or intimately knowing the immediate area so that you can provide the utmost in convenience. The coronavirus has had sweeping consequences in terms of what businesses are open or not and what the new rules are for each in terms of capacities or PPE regulations. Oftentimes, small businesses haven’t kept their Google business listings properly up to date, so there’s an opportunity here for your team to shine.

As another example, a quick web search on a smartphone will elicit the top restaurants in a city, but a concierge should be able to find exactly the right place to eat based upon the point-in-time needs of a guest or group, while also factoring in revised hours of operation, post-Covid reopening promos, social distancing measures or gratis meal inclusions for sending the guests to a particular restaurant. The same promotional agreements might also be ironed out with sightseeing attractions, park trails, outdoor activities, shopping centers, individual stores or limited-time events.

While a lot of this involves negotiated partnerships with local providers, technology upgrades are instrumental because these updated features will only be meaningful to guests if they know in advance of their stays that they are available. You need strong language across all third-party OTAs that your team has the ‘inside edge’ on what the neighborhood can currently offer due to Covid, including private discounts and exclusive access that would be otherwise unattainable via public routes.

Next are the marketing channels that are wholly within your control. First, there is your website, for which there are a few vendors who are able to curate local content and keep it updated. Otherwise, you can undoubtedly recruit a web developer to install a plugin so guests have a good user interface by which to browse through all the partnership promos you offer to those individuals with a reservation as well as all new safety or cleanliness measures. Second are your prearrival communications whereby you have another chance to upsell guests on local activities and deals through well-honed messaging on these emails.

Ultimately, it all comes back to the aforementioned question about how your team can compete against an entity as omniscient as the Google search algorithm and all the other aggregated third-party travel or restaurant websites. With the coronavirus throwing a wrench in everything, you can prosper by being the voice of reassurance. To compete, though, you will need to both reinvigorate those local relationships and you will need to broadcast these partnerships across all your top-of-funnel marketing channels so that guests are more motivated to book with you because of these unique offers.

One of the world’s most published writers in hospitality, Larry Mogelonsky is the principal of Hotel Mogel Consulting Limited, a Toronto-based consulting practice. His experience encompasses hotel properties around the world, both branded and independent, and ranging from luxury and boutique to select-service. Larry is also on several boards for companies focused on hotel technology. His work includes five books, “Are You an Ostrich or a Llama?” (2012), “Llamas Rule” (2013), “Hotel Llama” (2015), “The Llama is Inn” (2017) and “The Hotel Mogel” (2018). You can reach Larry at larry@hotelmogel.com to discuss hotel business challenges or to book speaking.

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The in-room tablet is a guest-facing mobile device that is always open and always communicating. Not only does the tablet provide general service information on the hotel and city, but it also facilitates roomservice, sends message alerts, gives guests choices over room cleaning times or opting out of housekeeping altogether, controls the room environment (lights, drapes, temperature, Do Not Disturb, and TV), streamlines check out, sends surveys, shares loyalty club information, facilitates service requests, charges guests’ personal mobile devices, and provides alarm clock functionality. Soon, these guestroom command centers will also be capable of streaming music via Bluetooth speakers in the charging bases and supporting guests’ requests on voice command using Far-Field Speech and Voice Recognition technology also housed in the base.

The communication reach of tablets is not confined to just the guestroom; operators are leveraging these devices to also connect guests to convention/meeting planners, retail outlets, recreational spaces, and the community. Why then, with an estimated 17 million guestrooms worldwide, are less than 100,000 rooms equipped with these smart devices?

The 2020 Lodging Technology Study cites Business Intelligence (48%), Point of Sale (39%), Predictive Analysis (39%), Customer Experience (36%), and Internet of Things (33%) as top enterprise software investments for 2020. The data collected, analyzed and leveraged by each one of these separate technologies can also be derived through tablets. When it comes to guest-facing technology investments, the study shows that hoteliers are adding for the first time, upgrading or changing suppliers related to Instant Messaging (45%), CRM/Loyalty (33%), and Interactive Digital Signage (23%). Guess what? Each of these are functions of today’s tablets too.

What appears to be missing from this study is data on the in-room tablet investment this year. So, I did some research and learned from the survey group that only 6% of hoteliers plan to add in-room tablets for first time, 3% are upgrading, and 72% have no plans to change from what they are currently offering. Unfortunately, the legacy tablets (or in-room computers) introduced a decade ago as a digital answer to printed compendiums and roomservice menus — and even newer tablets of 2015 and beyond — don’t have near the functionality or data management tools of today’s tablets. So why the wait-and-see approach?

The answer is simple: some hoteliers are under the misconception that tablets will soon be replaced by Apps or Smart Televisions. Neither is correct. If you want to invest in IoT, the smart money is on tablets. Here’s why …

Apps vs. Tablets

App Fatigue is running rampant. Statista estimates there were around 230 billion app downloads in 2019 or roughly 630 million app downloads each day. The company predicts that number will grow to 258.2 billion by 2022. Considering that the average U.S. consumer spends more time using apps than watching TV (Social Media Today) — the average person spends 198 minutes or 3.3 hours per day — hoteliers will be hard-pressed to make their apps download-worthy and compete for travelers’ attention. Especially since most consumers engage with apps for social media, music, video and gaming. None of those elements can be found on a hotel’s app – but they can ALL be leveraged via an in-room tablet.

Getting guests to engage with tablets isn’t difficult; rather, it’s the way guests prefer to interact with the hotel. According to the most recent JD Powers research, offering an in-room tablet increases overall guest satisfaction by as much as 47 points due to the communication system’s ability to engage guests and entice them to use the system by featuring information relevant to their stay. The guest satisfaction study further showed that only 15% of guests will download the hotel’s app, of those only 46% will use it during their stay, leaving the hotel with an actual take-rate of 7% usage of their mobile app. This makes the tablet — or in-room billboard — the only logical choice.

So, instead of developing an app because you think you should, there is far more value and a quicker investment return on installing in-room tablets to meet guest and operational needs. Better yet, no one will have to deal with app downloads or the cost of app development.

TVs vs. Tablets

There is speculation that the next step for the hotel room TVs is to command the guestroom. Sure, it can control lights, thermostats and more through interfaces to peripheral room technologies. It can also let guests stream their personal service programming, such as Netflix, Hulu Plus or Amazon Prime or stream music from Pandora or Spotify. But the TV must be “turned on” to gain any benefits. With travelers bringing their own entertainment devices while on the road, oftentimes they remain connected to their smart phones and laptops instead – especially if the hotel doesn’t offer streaming capabilities.

Some argue that the TV should be the command center since guests are facing the device most of the time while in the room. Tablets, however, are strategically placed on the bed-side table, equally visible and close at hand when the guest needs it. More importantly, those devices are “always on.” Customizable welcome screens draw guests’ attention, making them want to engage with the hotel. While most units are programmed to “go dark” after 11:00 p.m. (as to not interfere with guests’ sleep), the devices can be awakened with just a touch and used continuously if desired.

When the TV is turned on, it is generally broadcasting movies or news; guests don’t typically use the TV as source of information or transactions. Some hotels set-up dedicated stations to provide hotel and local-area information, but viewing is limited. When people want that type of information, it’s easier for them to search by smartphone, tablet or laptop. Then there’s the clunky handheld controller. Have you tried to type anything using a hotel TV remote? It’s enormously frustrating, so guests turn it off. When that happens, the TV stops communicating. That means the hotel has lost the ability to reach the guest.

The real benefit of the in-room TV is its large screen, making viewing easy from anywhere. But requiring guests to navigate through multiple menus to turn light on/off, temperature up/down, request morning coffee, or deliver room service — forget about it. It’s simply not practical to expect guests to order food and beverage from the TV using the clumsy interface and guest experience that the remove provides. Instead, placing that function on a tablet conforms to existing usage patterns, and gets extremely high engagement.

Remember the HNN 2020 Hotel Trend Report I mentioned in the beginning of this article? They also predicted “there will no longer be desks in the room because millennial travelers are more likely to work while sitting in bed.” That work will likely come by way of a tablet or laptop — certainly not by navigating menu screens via TV remote control.

Do you want to enable guests to stream music from Pandora or Spotify? Send it to the tablet docking station that is equipped with high-quality audio speakers. Want to enable guests to order roomservice from local restaurants vs. having to manage your own operation? Outsource the service to the tablet provider. Want to offer mobile-device charging via new alarm clock/radios but don’t have the budget for equipment? Let guests power up through the tablet dock and set alarms on the tablet. Need to reduce operating expenses? Encourage guests to opt out of room cleaning with instant alert messages on the tablet. Hope to reach every event delegate with special offers, promos and meeting materials? Set up a communication channel on the tablet. Wish you had voice technology that enables guests to speak requests but can’t afford to add smart speakers? Add voice-enabled microphones to the dock. These capabilities and many more are already available to hotels.

The bottom line is this: Tablets are the only way to reach 100% of guests. My prediction for 2025 is that Tablets — not Apps, not TVs — will be the No. 1 in-room appliance for controlling the guestroom.

Richard Carruthers is Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer of Hotel Communication Network (HCN), an Ottawa, Ontario, Canada provider of innovative high-value in-room tablets that keeps each guest connected to their hotel, city and each other.

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Owned by FibraHotel, which ranks as the largest hotel owner in Mexico, with a portfolio that includes 86 hotel properties, and managed by Posadas Hotels, Fiesta Americana had a specific goal in mind: provide the guest room of the future in their hotels to create a unique, connected in-room experience for their guests while also conserving energy usage. To enable this experience, Fibra turned to one of the fastest growing private technology companies in the United States, Enseo^®. Enseo worked with long-term sister company and technology provider, Catapult Tech, for a comprehensive IoT device management platform and guest entertainment system, as well guest remote applications.

When guests check into a room at the Fiesta Americana Viaducto Aeropuerto, they find that they can use the traditional room remote control or their own smartphone to control the television, window shades, room lighting, and the temperature with ease through Enseo’s Fido comprehensive IoT product. Fido turns any hotel room into a smart, energy efficient, connected room and elevates guest comfort and satisfaction.

Enseo’s versatile platform also provides the best-in-class in-room entertainment system, including access to apps such as Netflix^® and YouTube^® and a highly customized user interface developed with Fiesta Americana to welcome guests into the hotel’s uniquely crafted experience.

Located inside the Via 515 mixed use project in Mexico City on Viaducto, Fiesta Americana Viaducto Aeropuerto is the most modern full-service hotel near Mexico City´s Benito Juarez International Airport. The hotel, with 260 full-service rooms, has modern public areas, meeting rooms, conference and event space with a terrace and features the Los Canarios restaurant and a bar.

“We are thrilled to be working with Enseo and hope that this is the first of many projects to come,” commented Simón Galante CEO of FibraHotel. “We have a strong desire to become the hospitality leaders in technology in Mexico. FibraHotel is in a technological transformation, and Fiesta Americana Viaducto is the best example of it.”

At the center of Enseo’s Fido solution at Fiesta Americana is the guest’s own smartphone. EnseoCONNECT allows guests to use their own mobile devices on any network to control their TV, room lights, window shades, thermostats, and other connected devices in their room. This unified remote approach does not require guests to download an app, maintain a login or touch the guest room remote at all. Guests do not even have to join the hotel Wi-Fi network. Instead, guests simply pair with the TV for instant access and control of their entire connected in-room experience.

Enseo, a privately-held, woman, Latina-owned business, is one of the fastest growing technology companies in the U.S. Celebrating 20 years in 2020, Enseo is renowned for delivering sustainable innovation to the hospitality and education markets. With a platform enjoyed by more than 84 million guests annually, Enseo offers four core products in one platform: in-room entertainment, high-speed internet, energy management & room control (IoT), and the MadeSafe® employee safety system.

Enseo has been recognized for excellence as one of the best Entrepreneurial Companies in America for three consecutive years by Entrepreneur Magazine’s Entrepreneur 360 List, the 10th Fastest-Growing Women-Owned/Led Company by Women Presidents’ Organization (WPO), and consistently recognized on the Inc. 5000 as one of the fastest growing companies in the US.

Catapult Tech is the innovation behind some of the world’s leading solution providers. After 20 years of driving technology, Catapult Tech holds more than 40 US patents in the areas of IoT, in-room entertainment, connected room technology, and others.

“I am honored to have been chosen by Fibra to bring the world’s most advanced guest room into reality. Mexico City has always been known for culinary and fashion innovation, now we’ve worked together to add ultimate hotel technology,” commented Vanessa Ogle, CEO and founder of Enseo. “The leadership of Fibra and Posadas worked together with the technology team at Catapult Tech. By joining everyone’s expertise, we launched the world’s most advanced and welcoming guest experience and also brought tremendous benefit of an enticing price point to the owners that will save both the bottom line as well as the environment. This team has paved the way to the hotel room of the future.”

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The NEW 2020 hotel experience is smart-speaker centric and it involves connecting these devices to the TV, thermostat, live-streaming radio services and other hotel systems to make the guest experience more natural and like home — actually better than home.

eMarketer predicts that 118 million people will rely on voice assistants this year, with the number growing to 123 million by 2021. Therefore, bringing smart speakers into the guestroom experience to improve communication and efficiencies is just smart business.

Wanting the Viceroy Hotels & Resorts experience to feel like a natural extension of our guests’ daily lives, we made the commitment to go “all in” with voice technology last year. To do this, we had to find a technology partner that was innovative, flexible, customizable and could easily integrate with existing property technologies. It also needed to meet the complex technical specifications of our hotels while simultaneously adhering to our obligation to ensure guest privacy.

While the quest seemed to be a steep challenge, after doing our diligence we were drawn to Volara — as its enterprise grade conversation management software and platform agnostic approach enabled the flexibility and security required by our hotels. Their software was proven out in peer hotels across the globe and the data driving their automated conversation models was informed by voice-based interactions with more than 10 million hotel guests. The aggregated data was central to the solution’s ability to accurately reply to our guests’ complex requests and that made a big difference.  Alexa itself seemed like a good choice given its consumer adoption, but Volara really made it work for the hotel environment.

Success from the Start

Before embarking on our own journey with voice, I was familiar with a few hotels that had tried launching home grown voice programs with limited success. Utilization rates were low, and their ownership was rightly concerned they hadn’t done what was necessary to safeguard their guests’ personally identifiable information. Complaints outnumbered positive reviews and the programs were cancelled before they really got out of the gate.

To the contrary, the conversation-management software and seamless integrations enabling the voice solution at Viceroy Hotels & Resorts creates a hotel business tool atop Alexa. It’s because of this innovative, flexible and customizable technology that we are seeing exceptional utilization rates, delivering an optimal guest experience, driving meaningful efficiencies, and scaling personal — even traditional — hospitality.

Volara’s software had integrations to more than 40 hotel technologies, including interactive television, room controls, PBX, music, and work order-management. Guests staying at our Viceroy L’Ermitage Beverly Hills, for example, are controlling lighting, Do Not Disturb/Make up Room settings, and room temperature through Volara’s integration to INNCOM by Honeywell. They are using their voices to control the TV (from changing channels to adjusting the volume) through integration to Sonifi. They are listening to Viceroy curated playlists or asking Alexa to play their preferred music genre via integration to iHeartRadio.

Nearly all our guests are using the smart speaker to request hotel service information and amenities (from outlet open/close times, directions, and local area attractions to pillows, toothbrushes, minibar refreshments and more). This is possible due to Volara’s connection to the ALICE Hotel Operations Platform. Having these integrations in place made deployment of this highly successful voice program quick and easy.

Ensuring the highest levels of guest privacy and hotel data security was the final piece to our implementation puzzle. Volara ensures that recordings of guests are never associated with their personally identifiable information. All recordings of guests are deleted within 24 hours — a distinct difference from the management of user recordings in the consumer environment. The company also ensures that any hotel technologies that enhance the voice-based experience are securely integrated (meaning, there is no leakage of hotel proprietary data to Amazon itself).

Although my technical diligence confirmed the solution was secure for guest use, we expected that some of our guests may still be skeptical — so together with the Volara team we implemented a guest education process and trained the hotel staff on how to respond to guests questions.

No Risk, Just Reward

Guests are certainly having fun with the Alexa devices. Feedback on review sites and from post-stay surveys has been positive. While satisfaction scores continue to rise, the measurable cost savings have as well. We are seeing a substantial improvement in delivery time for any guest requests through Alexa and guests are enjoying the added convenience of just saying “Alexa, call the front desk” or “Alexa, call the concierge,” to connect with our staff without having to pick up the phone. The easier we make it to connect with staff, the happier our guests will be and the more often they will return.

We’ve been able to increase hotel revenues, reduce labor costs and streamline operations because the integrated voice platform is giving guests instant access to the information and services that are important to them.

Throughout 2020 we will be deploying smart speakers at all Viceroy hotels as we further optimize how our guests are interacting and engaging by voice command. We are in discussions with Volara to develop a service for meeting planners and social groups to use voice commands to control lighting, start video presentations, order food and beverage, and place additional requests from meeting rooms.

We are also brainstorming back-of-house applications to streamline engineering tasks, enable room status changes, and facilitate staff-to-staff communications. Finally, we are researching the viability of interfacing an AI chatbot with Volara to make these voice interactions and experiences more personal for guests and more efficient for operators.

As travel becomes even more data driven, it is foreseeable that a guest could name the qualities they are seeking in an excursion and, based on an algorithm, the smart speaker will recommend more precise detailed recommendations, all with a conversation rather than searching on laptop or mobile. Though guests care about keeping their personal data secure, research shows that many are willing to share proactively if it means a more personalized experience.

The bottom line is this: voice is here to stay. Hoteliers should start to embrace the technology and implement it within their brands immediately if they want to remain competitive. By simply looking at the annual stats, you can see that consumers are using voice daily for everything from search, to information, to room controls within their homes. They love the frictionless experience of voice technologies.

Now that the proper enterprise controls and management features are in place, why not bring this technology within the hotel and interface to key hotel systems to enhance the guest experience?

Darren Clark is VP of Technology for Viceroy Hotels & Resorts. Darren is a technology specialist who has over 20 years of experience in Hospitality IT and emerging technologies. Throughout his career he has worked in a VP role for established hospitality companies such as Starwood Hotels & Resorts, Fairmont Hotels, Andre Balazs Hotels and Standard Hotels International. His career has gained invaluable experience for the luxury, boutique and lifestyle sectors in both the hotel and residential fields. The Viceroy Icon Collection properties include epic hotels and resorts in Los Cabos, Chicago, Beverly Hills, Riviera Maya, Snowmass, and St. Lucia, with forthcoming openings in Serbia, Algarve and Panama. The Viceroy Lifestyle Series hotels and resorts are found in attitude-led destinations such as Santa Monica. The Viceroy Urban Retreats in San Francisco and Washington D.C. have an independent spirit and bold, eccentric personalities. Viceroy Hotels & Resorts is a member of the Global Hotel Alliance (GHA) DISCOVERY, a unique loyalty program offering exclusive benefits and experiences to its members at over 500 hotels around the world.

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“We’re pleased to have been selected by Oaklawn as they embark on this expansion into hospitality,” said INTELITY SVP of Sales, Benjamin Keller. “After a thorough and highly competitive selection process including multiple customer references, technical reviews, and site visits, we’re ecstatic to have earned their business. Our existing customer base is our biggest asset and we’re excited to be welcoming Oaklawn to the INTELITY family.”

Founded in 1904, Oaklawn Racing Casino Resort has a rich racing history and also offers non-stop casino action year-round. It is the #1 tourist attraction in Arkansas and is home to The Racing Festival of the South and, most notably, the annual $1 million Arkansas Derby. Oaklawn regularly ranks among the top five Thoroughbred racetracks in North America in purse structure and attendance.

“We are excited about this new chapter for Oaklawn,” said Wayne Smith, Oaklawn Racing Casino Resort’s General Manager. “As we invest in building our new luxury hotel, implementing the right technology is a top priority. INTELITY offers solutions that will help us provide an enhanced experience and elevated service features that will help us exceed the expectations of our guests.”

Oaklawn will use INTELITY’s award-winning platform to create a frictionless guest experience across the property. Guests will have access to a fully branded mobile app, with mobile check-in and mobile key, the ability to request services and amenities, book reservations, view current promotions and communicate with staff. The new hotel will feature in-room tablets in every guest room and suite, which function as a digital compendium, offer access to all the property’s services, in-room dining, hotel promotions, events and retail offerings, and much more. Oaklawn will also offer tablets in public areas to provide guests with access to rich property and local information.

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“Recognizing that modern technology is the most powerful way to equip staff with the tools necessary to further enhance the guest experience, we wanted to make sure we were working with the best software currently available on the market,” said Todd Orlich, area vice president of operations at sbe and Delano South Beach. “The intuitive nature and ease of use of the software developed by Nuvola attracted us to delve deeper into how we would be able to benefit from deploying their full suite of solutions. The level of customer service and hands-on approach Nuvola offers during training is something we have never experienced before in a tech partner. We are thrilled to be partnering with Nuvola and working with Juan Carlos again to create a higher level of guest satisfaction.”

Developed by a former hotelier whose journey into the hotel industry began at Delano South Beach, Nuvola’s creation process focuses on the unique first-person perspective to ensure each module is user-friendly and saves both time and money. The integration ensures a near-seamless operational system for the hotel partner, enhancing information sharing between departments as well as between guests and staff. The solution suite can be managed through Nuvola’s desktop and mobile staff-facing platform, allowing employees to initiate work orders, communicate with guests, and monitor status reports for every department remotely.

“The ability to come full circle and work with the resort that I owe so much of my hospitality career to has been a main goal of mine since the genesis of Nuvola,” said Juan Carlos Abello, Nuvola CEO. “Delano South Beach consistently looks for new ways to improve both guest experiences and staff productivity at the resort, and I am delighted to be working with the hotel again to provide enhanced services, now through our comprehensive optimization platform.”

Implementation of the full Nuvola suite into Delano South Beach’s daily systems is the first launch within a larger partnership with globally recognized hospitality, cuisine, design and lifestyle group, sbe. The luxury resort is the first sbe property to take advantage of the full suite of Nuvola’s robust hotel-technology platform and will be an introduction to all hotels within the organization as an approved company-wide partner.

Training across all departments within the Delano began with interactive demonstrations with the Housekeeping staff from Abello himself, the department in which he began his career while working at Delano South Beach. Abello kicked off the training sessions by leading the Monday morning Housekeeping line-up at Delano. He was able to relive his former years by participating in the morning brief and then working alongside staff to complete daily tasks.

“It was great to be back on property and train alongside former colleagues in a new capacity to launch the product I created with them specifically in mind, continued Abello. “The importance of the Housekeeping staff and the hard work that goes into each of the hotel department’s day to day task management could not be overstated. It was an honor to revisit and show my appreciation for these dedicated and diligent team members while training staff on how to use the Nuvola platform.”

Nuvola’s fully comprehensive and intuitive hotel staff optimization and guest engagement platform allows hoteliers to offer an elevated experience for travelers while easing day to day task management for employees.

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But there is one ritual that Americans consistently dread this time of year: The waking nightmare that is holiday travel. While not everyone has to travel far to be with the ones they love, more than 54 million Americans trekked 50-plus miles over Thanksgiving in 2018, according to AAA.

For many travelers, the thought of couch surfing on top of battling traffic on the highways and at the airport is a bridge too far. So, naturally, they’ll turn to the hotel brands they trust to give them a reliable “home away from home” when they’re visiting a new zip code over the holidays.

And while guests aren’t looking to live out their Home Alone 2 fantasies with every luxury amenity a kid left unsupervised might request from their lodgings, there are a few prerequisites that travelers have come to expect whenever they’re away from home. In addition to a comfortable bed and a hot shower, fast, reliable WiFi joins the must-have basics hotels have to provide.

The criticality of WiFi

A recent study from Forrester Research found that of all the amenities patrons seek in the hotels they do business with, wireless connectivity is what guests desire most. This makes sense considering how much connectivity influences the lives of every member of the family.

Ninety-four percent of business travelers polled by Forrester, for instance, agreed that well-performing WiFi was “essential to their stay.” While the whole point of holiday travel is to unplug from work, it’s rare for individuals who are accustomed to checking work email on any number of the devices they have handy (smartphone, smartwatch, tablet, etc.) to completely check out. Even workaholics traveling sans family need access to WiFi to download binge-worthy content or update their podcast cache before their next flight when they are getting some downtime from their work commitments.

It’s a critical consideration for kids, too. If a cranky toddler isn’t able to access their favorite Netflix show on a tablet once they’ve settled in from a long car ride, for instance, it’s going to be anything but a joyful holiday for mom or dad.

Perhaps even more importantly, many people’s holidays don’t involve visiting family, but enjoying a relaxing getaway, often abroad. Where international guests are concerned, many may be averse to changing their wireless data plans to accommodate a short trip to a foreign locale.

And with 89 percent of guests “deciding where to lodge based on free reliable WiFi,” according to the 2018 Lodging Technology Study, access to connectivity is now literally the first thing brands should be delivering to guests.

Business consequences of bad connectivity

Poor guest WiFi can result in negative guest satisfaction as measured by post-stay surveys, which hold a lot of weight in a market where 64 percent of leisure travelers claim they aren’t loyal to a particular marquee, according to the 2018 Lodging Tech study cited above. This isn’t just a bad reflection on the brand, as it can result in adverse business consequences for individual property managers, too, including loss of repeat customer business, poor online reviews, managers not getting bonuses, or worse, loss of franchise.

But this also goes beyond just delivering performant guest WiFi, as connectivity is now at the heart of almost every interaction guests have with their hotel brands. For instance, just as shoppers now expect a more streamlined point-of-sale experience when they visit brick-and-mortar storefronts, hotel guests have little patience for bottlenecks at the front desk. If connectivity works and travelers can successfully use an app to check in/out or access their room, they may not ever even need to visit the front desk in the first place.

As a result, the back-of-house applications hotels used to manage their bookings are now often equipped to function on mobile devices, while some brands have removed humans from the equation altogether, instead relying on connected self-serve kiosks to help guests kick-off their stay.

Digital transformation in the hospitality industry

With connectivity playing such a critical business role, hotel brands are exploring similar “digital transformation” initiatives that have already taken root in other sectors by retiring their data-center-centric network architectures for cloud or direct-to-internet configurations, or a combination of architectures supported by SD-WAN.

The benefits here are clear to see. For starters, global hotel brands will need to leverage an array of cloud vendors and ISPs to support and deliver traffic across the network; if IT can retire their physical legacy network infrastructure, they’ll no longer need to exhaust resources to support hardware, nor will they need a local IT presence at each branch location.

Some of the drawbacks, however, might include a lack of visibility into what’s going on locally at each remote location. While the old network architecture that was based around a data center and VPNs allowed IT to have insight into the network elements under their direct control like switches, routers, access points, and firewalls, IT teams lose that visibility when they rely on cloud and Internet exclusively. If one branch location is experiencing poor latency compared to other locations, IT will need a monitoring solution that delivers visibility along each network path to pinpoint the actual cause of the issue and to resolve it.

This is true for assuring that WiFi is getting delivered with minimal delay at each of the brand’s branch locations, too. Rather than supporting a local IT team at each hotel in a brand’s portfolio, a comprehensive network performance monitoring solution should be able to see past local firewalls and into the LAN, giving a centralized IT operation a “local perspective” to identify potential issues isolated to one location on the network.

Travelers are already juggling a lot of considerations as they embark on their holiday travel plans. They shouldn’t have to worry about staying connected to their lives back at home, too, as this is meant to be the most wonderful time of the year. When brands can satisfy their guests with, at the very least, stellar connectivity, a stay with that hotelier could become an annual part of the holidays for years to come.

Adam Edwards is Chief Customer Officer at AppNeta, the only network performance monitoring solution that analyzes network data through a 4-Dimensional lens, delivering actionable, end-to-end insights from the end-user perspective. With AppNeta’s SaaS-based solution, IT and Network Ops teams at large, distributed enterprises can quickly pinpoint issues that affect network and business-critical cloud application performance, regardless of where they occur. AppNeta is trusted by some of the biggest Fortune 1000 companies, including 3 out of the 5 largest corporations in the world, as well as 4 out of the 5 largest cloud providers.

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“HCN is eager to attend HX 2019 to network with hoteliers looking to create extraordinary guest experiences, drive revenues, boost satisfaction and increase loyalty,” said Kevin Bidner, HCN CEO. “Our Navigator Tablets are answering the industry’s demand for digital programs by giving owners the tools they need to grow their businesses and increase profits.”

At HX: The Hotel Experience, hoteliers will see how they can use HCN’s Navigator Tablets to:

• Streamline housekeeping by offering guests a choice in opting out of room cleaning and offering late check out. The result is an efficient use of labor and increased revenues from upselling a longer stay. Based on a 1,000-room hotel, HCN’s new “Guest Choice” program can potentially save owners up to $50 per room per month in labor and generate additional revenues from up-selling late check out and other services.
• Generate a 22% increase in roomservice revenue through tablet ordering or outsource it to HCN via their revolutionary DineIN program. HCN’s “DineIn” program will enable guests to order from the hotel’s onsite restaurant and grab and go options via the Navigator tablet. HCN’s innovative upselling techniques are proving to increase room service ticket revenues by 22%. If the hotel doesn’t have a room service offering, guests can order from local restaurants that are handpicked to provide a wide variety of local dining options vs. relying on the hotel kitchen. All menus are digital, and orders are placed via Navigator tablets and delivered to guests in their rooms or a location of their choice.
• Extend event branding into every delegate’s guestroom exclusively. The HCN Navigator tablet is a powerful platform enabling event organizers to communicate with their attendees directly via the HCN “Event” program. Selling direct channel marketing to event goers and connecting them to the hotel, the city and each other will drive hotel revenues and boost customer review scores.

To preschedule an appointment with an HCN team member at HX: The Hotel Experience Powered by AAHOA, email kbidner@hcn-inc.com.

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Zingle has invested in AI to intelligently distribute service requests across an organization to drive increased revenue per customer through immediate service delivery and personalized offers at the right time. After raising $11 million in funding late last year, Zingle has been singularly focused on building out its suite of hotel-specific product features.

Recently, the company announced new integrations with several leading solutions used in hospitality property operations, including Springer-Miller Systems, Maestro PMS, Megasys, and Visual One from Agilysys. With these new integrations, Zingle gained access to key customer data that allows hotels to segment customers, personalize communications, and deliver an elevated service experience. Ingesting critical guest and reservation information also enables Zingle to trigger the creation of service tickets based off of guest messaging conversations, as well as pass conversational intelligence to business intelligence tools to correlate customer communication patterns with spend.

The new integrations allow hotel and resort customers to leverage the wealth of data they have access to through their third party systems and put it to work through Zingle’s platform to improve operations, drive additional revenue and create memorable guest experiences.

With Zingle, customer data can be consumed from virtually any system through pre-built API integrations, flat file imports (SFTP/email), and third-party connectors. Zingle also has pre-existing integrations with Amadeus HotSOS and Oracle’s Opera.

This summer, the company rolled out several new AI and analytics features aimed at increasing hotel loyalty and personalizing the end-to-end travel experience, including auto-categorization, rollup analytics, intent-triggered automation, and conversation analytics. Together these features should go a long way toward helping hotels to communicate with guests in more meaningful and personalized ways while capturing actionable insights to improve operations.

Auto-categorization

Auto-categorization takes Zingle’s manual categorization of messages to the next level, applying artificial intelligence to automatically categorize messages. This gives hotels greater insights into trending topics and potential service issues.

Rollup Analytics

Rollup analytics and reporting is a powerful way to gain insight into guest engagement and resolution performance, not just for a specific location, but across all the properties in a portfolio. Users are able to get as granular as needed with filtering and grouping capabilities, or select different attributes to look at big-picture performance metrics across all properties.

Intent-triggered Automation

Automations (“Zings”) are powerful, automated workflows hotel operators can deploy to drive operational efficiencies and improve the guest experience. Zingle users can set up a “trigger” that will automate an “action.” Intent-triggered automations use Zingle’s trained AI to recognize hospitality focused “intents” in guest messages. There are dozens of intents available today, including intents to recognize plumbing issues, process information requests (like gym hours), or request room-cleaning.

Conversation Analytics

Zingle’s new conversation analytics provide real-time data and insights on how responsive guests are through all the messaging channels Zingle supports, and how effective staff is in responding to and resolving guest needs. Reports include insights on conversation volumes, median messages per conversation, peak message times, user responsiveness and resolution times by agent, resolution performance by time period, and more. Analytics provide actionable guidance for increased customer engagement, as well as the ability to maximize team efficiency and effectiveness.

In addition to a steady stream of new product features and enhancements, Zingle had seen impressive growth in its customer base, and an expansion of activity on its platform as hotels discover new ways to engage and service guests with brand-differentiated experiences orchestrated through Zingle. Hundreds of hotels and resorts, including properties from such brands as Kalahari Resorts, InterContinental Hotels & Resorts, and Great Wolf Lodge, have subscribed to Zingle’s solution.

Meanwhile, founded in 2001, Medallia is the pioneer and market leader in customer experience management technology. Based in San Francisco, and with 15 global offices, including in San Mateo, New York, London, Paris, Sydney, Buenos Aires, and Tel Aviv, the company’s platform reportedly tracks a billion comments each quarter. Total revenue for last quarter was $95.7 million, an increase of 27% from the same period last year.

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