In the past few years, tourists and travelers do not just look for necessary facilities like room, food, and complimentary services anymore. They expect facilities that are more personalized and convenient. Therefore, the hotel industry had to adopt smart technology to keep up with customer’s expectations.
The hotel industry is undergoing a digital transformation at a rapid pace. Technology has brought a profound change in the industry, and it continues to disrupt and revolutionize operations in the hospitality game. Thousands of software and hybrid app development services have stepped up into the world of hospitality and elevated it to new heights.
We understand it’s quite a task for a business owner to meet the demands of its audience, but with the right technology in your hands, it sure gets easier. With the recent evolution, the hotel market has changed its focus from revenue to the customers.
You might have heard the famous quote :
“If you do not take care of your customers, Your competitors will.”
That is pretty much the gist of this article. We want to convey that a good ROI can be generated only if your customers leave your hotel happily.
We have to gear up in the technology race and be quick and handy with our management solutions.
Moreover, amidst the pandemic situation, the entire focus has changed to reducing the common touchpoints. From keeping the rooms “aesthetically clean” to “clinically clean,” every hotel is trying to develop excellent applied methods to keep their guests safe and sanitized. When priorities are changing at such rates, we believe the technologies favoring contactless communication can rescue us.
Therefore, we have come up with expert technology solutions that have already started dominating the industry. These innovations have led to progress towards digital movements all over the world. Whether it’s about your guests checking-in digitally or you, providing the services online, it is a win-win situation for all of us until we keep safe.
So wasting any more of your precious time, let us start with some distinctive hotel technology trends that you can employ to leverage your resources and systems.
Smart Energy Management
When installing smart thermostats and occupancy sensors in the rooms, they monitor and respond to occupancy movements. Similarly, smart energy management systems using sophisticated machine learning algorithms can help you analyze constant thermodynamics, energy consumption, local weather patterns, and peak demand loads in real-time. These management systems aren’t just some fancy tools or modern speculations; they can actually reduce the entire hotel’s energy cost up to 25%, saving you all the unnecessary resources and generating you the fastest payback period.
Now, this is what we call smart tech management.
Although the energy savings from IoT is not just limited to heating and thermostatic. The smart light technology can help you understand the consumption rates, energy needs, and help you adapt to any kind of real-time changes.
Predictive Maintenance
Just like how energy management systems (EMSs) allow hoteliers to monitor and optimize energy consumption, Predictive maintenance uses sensor data to identify any hazardous phase around before it translates into a costly issue. Therefore instead of waiting for a component to break down, IoT controls everything by predicting the maintenance needs through system sage, prevents failures, and reduces the cost of working with a faulty one.
Similarly, online management platforms collect and update data for every room in the hotel and assign them efficiency ratings. These ratings are an indicator of how quickly a room can be cooled down or heated back according to the guest’s preferred temperature and provides the management team with a critical alert when an HVAC machine needs attention.
Smart Guest Experiences
Hotels cannot operate without guests, and that is the primary reason hoteliers need to focus on a personalized and hassle-free guest experience. Smart guests experience offers many technical advantages to this factor. You can not only use your guest’s data to accommodate them better, but also, with the help of occupancy sensors, you can automate guest interactions throughout their stay easily. This reduces both friction costs and labor costs.
This way, your guests would not feel the requirement to call room service every time they need something. Smart technology has enabled personalized guest experience in many five star hotels where it predicts the aggregated data and preferences based on their previous stays.
Isn’t this a brilliant solution to all your stay related worries?
Big Data Protection
One of the significant benefits of smart technology is how it accumulates data and makes it litigable. But when you are a hotelier, managing personal guest data and other information is the most significant responsibility. Big data is an excellent choice for every responsible enterprise, whether you want to tackle a new market segment or compare your rate plans according to that of your competitors. However, the primary concern regarding necessary data and big data is the security around it.
Every hotel’s goal is to keep their customer’s information safe, but that is easier said than done these days. Today we see massive data breaches, cyber-attacks, and data leak stories that have literally put millions of consumers at risk. Due to its price point, big data solutions are accessible to large scale and medium-sized segments of the hotel market. We expect to see more hoteliers to adopt and invest in this security element.
Hotel Robots
Hotel robots are among the fascinating hotel technology trends proliferating in countries like the UK and USA. Robots are used to greet guests upon arrival, guide them to nearby locations through AI, provide tourist information throughout the day, and the uses are extending far beyond this.
Apart from guest interaction, hotel robots can also assist in housekeeping activities such as vacuum cleaning and flooring high in demand in current times. Not only this, hoteliers in the UAE use robots for transporting luggage, room service, security, and restaurant waiting. By far, this is the most extraordinary innovation by humans to rely on equipped and skilled machines with improved performance over time through machine learning and Artificial Intelligence.
Remote Check-In and Check-Out
When your guests have the power to check-in and check-out through their devices, they would be relaxed by your convenient and flexible process, and on top of that, you can manage or predict better on their staffing needs. And imagine saving thousands of bucks on your reception area for labor costs. This technology will also alert the hotel staff on a pre basis upon the guest’s arrival. You can, therefore, prepare your rooms accordingly beforehand with their customized preferences.
Similarly, at the end of the guest’s stay, tourists can enjoy a seamless check-out experience from their very first visit. Who would not wanna come to your hotel after this?
Mobile Room Keys
Nowadays, many hotels are trying to provide room access to their guests via smartphone apps. This has several benefits:
- You save mother nature from plastic key cards.
- You save printing costs of plastic key cards.
- The hassle of managing key card inventory is reduced.
- You have all the data of your guests and their room assigned to your device.
- You have access to your device and your guest rooms from literally anywhere around.
Smart Room Service
How many times have you seen a robot delivering food for your guests at their doorstep? Isn’t this fascinating?
We understand it is quite expensive, but again it will all be worth it. Think of this for a long run, experimenting with technology, making commands to robots just by sitting on the chair sounds feasible.
Apart from this, smart occupancy sensors can help hotels push menu notifications to smartphones at optimal times when you have guests in their rooms. These notifications can even contain personalized suggestions that are based on their previous orders and preferences.
Moreover, many food delivery applications already offer a similar experience, which is a fantastic marketing tactic, reminding your customers of their last orders at frequent times so that they don’t forget you.
Smart Marketing Practices
Before hoteliers think of offering a smart guest experience, they should focus on bringing these guests to their doors. That’s where smart marketing comes to your rescue. Data opportunities for intelligent technology provides hotels a more complete picture of their guests before their arrival. Hotels should leverage these data insights for their marketing strategies and bring their brand ahead in their race.
Smart Reserved Parking
We know how parking of any building matters before we decide to stay there. Hotels can make it to their advantage and can use smart sensors and hotel applications to enable guests to reserve parking spots in advance. The sensors will cover their space assigned before arrival. This is the smoothest experience tactic used by successful hotels, especially in Europe. Even mobile app development companies have started investing in such applications that are not just limited to the hospitality industry.
On top of that, this will save the hotel’s manual managing parking inventory cost and will make your guests carefree the moment they pull in.
Online Reputation Management Technology
A company’s online reputation matters more than anything. People make their buying decisions based on the customer’s ratings and feedback. Therefore, it is essential to manage the positive environment of online space. A hotel’s digital prominence helps predict future bookings and offers valuable insight into how well a property delivered on guest’s expectations. Hence, operations will have to invest in platforms that monitor online reviews, manage online reputation, and utilize the feedback both the guest’s experiences and operational value.
Conclusion
These trends are just the beginning of a rapidly growing hospitality industry. There are other smart technologies such as smart-loyalty program management, customer surveys, and smart hotel management that play a crucial role in how hotels will be operating in the coming years.
The key to a successful hotel is implementing these technologies at the right time that meets your customers’ expectations and makes them realize that you know them better.
As we move towards 2021, we expect to see more hotels coming up with lavish properties and tech solutions, exploiting new sources of revenue. So if you are a hotelier or a part of the hospitality industry, we think it’s time to take a look at these trends and make them your own.
