Hospitality Technology

Smart controls

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Hotel smart-phone apps have become industry standard, but hospitality industry leaders are using the ubiquitous smart-phone in another manner: They’re giving hotel guests the ability to control their rooms via their smartphones. So-called smart controls have been growing in popularity, but major hotel chains are taking them on, leading smart controls toward becoming an expected hotel amenity.

At Starwood, Hilton, and Marriott hotels, guests can use their smartphones to open their hotel room doors and to access guest-only areas, such as fitness rooms and spas. At Virgin Hotel in Chicago, guests can use their smartphones to control room temperatures, adjust room lighting, and change the channels on their room televisions. All of the “smart controls” are possible through the use of the phone’s Bluetooth technology.

Moving forward, smart controls could allow guests to personalize their rooms in advance via the hotel app, pre-setting room temperatures and lighting preferences, and even selecting the choices for their mini bar.

Such tech-driven, personalized hotel stays will become crucial for the hospitality industry as America’s 80 million millennials become the generation spending the most on travel. Millennials — those born in the 1980s and 1990s — are set to beat out the Baby Boomers as the generation spending the most on travel by 2017, estimated at $200 billion on travel each year.

The millennial generation is characterized by a focus on technology-driven and personalized experiences. Eighty-five percent of millennials own a smartphone currently, which means that smart controls will be an easy way to appeal to millennial travelers.

Beacons

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Providing two-way communication with nearby Bluetooth-enabled smartphones, beacons went mainstream two years ago. Retailers led the way in experimenting with the technology, primarily using beacons to track shoppers’ habits and send promotional messages to consumers. Big names in retail, including Target, Walmart, and Macy’s have employed beacon technology in their stores. Beacons have become so widespread that Business Insider's BI Intelligence projected that beacons would create $40 billion in retail sales in the United States in 2016.

In addition to retailers, restaurants, airports, and museums have employed beacons successfully. Meanwhile, the hospitality industry has been slow to experiment with the technology. Some major chains now are beginning to see how beacons can be used to increase their profits.

At 14 of its locations this year, Marriott placed beacons at hotel hotspots such as spas, restaurants, and bars. Guests with the Marriott app enabled on their phones received promotional messages — for things like discounted spa services and restaurant deals — when passing by the beacons.

Starwood Hotels took a different approach to beacons, placing them near entrances at 30 locations to streamline the check-in process. As guests entered, the beacons received information from their smartphones, which allowed the concierge to greet the guests by name. Beacons placed near hotel room doorways notified housekeeping staff when guests were not in their rooms.

Hospitality industry innovators will be quick to find other applications for beacons. Beacons can be used for wayfinding within a hotel, or they can provide guests just entering their room with information on room features, how to order room service, or hotel spa services. Because beacons offer two-way communication, they can be used to gather data on guests habits, allowing hotels to determine where guests are spending most of their time in the hotel and what peak hours are for the fitness room, pool or hotel bar.

Virtual reality
With Facebook-owned Oculus leading the way, consumers are projected to purchase 14 million virtual reality headsets next year, with that number increasing consistently over the next five years to 38 million virtual reality headsets being sold in 2020, according to tech industry market researcher TrendForce.

Virtual reality enables travelers in the trip-planning stage to see themselves inside your destination. The experiences allow potential guests or event planners to walk through your hotel’s suites, spa, pool, meeting spaces, restaurants, and other key spaces. Such experiences give potential customers a first-hand experience with your hotel, making it easier for them to commit to booking a room or an event.

Virtual reality also can be a direct marketing tool. Low-cost cardboard headsets, like Google’s Cardboard, turn any smartphone into a virtual reality headset. The cardboard headsets can be branded with a company logo and sent directly to potential customers with instructions on how to take a virtual tour of your facilities.

But virtual reality offers more than marketing opportunities. Marriott has been a hospitality industry leader in virtual reality. Last year, through the company’s Travel Brilliantly campaign, Marriot staged an eight-city virtual reality tour with a “teleporter” set up that let users take virtually visit a Hawaiian beach and a London skyscraper.

This fall, Marriott began piloting “VRoom Service” at its New York and London locations. Through “VRoom Service,” hotel guests are able order virtual reality headsets to their rooms, on which they can view Marriott’s “VR Postcards,” three virtual reality experiences that follow travelers in Chile, Rwanda, and Beijing.

As with beacons, hotels can forge their own innovations with virtual reality technology. A virtual concierge service could allow guests to tour neighborhoods and attractions near the hotel from the comfort of their rooms. A hotel with virtual reality equipped conference rooms could allow meeting planners to use virtual reality presentations as part of their events — imagine an architect leading a virtual tour of a building during a conference or a doctor showcasing a new medical procedure virtually.

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Virtual reality is a strange activity to offer in a hotel. If you’re halfway around the world for a vacation or a business trip, you’re usually there to go outside for one reason or another. Sightseeing, attending meetings, that sort of thing, not slapping a headset on and losing yourself elsewhere.
But then, Marriott isn’t like most hotels — many of its branches in the UK are in the business of selling luxury, no expense spared accommodation. Here, guests want a special stay, and like an expensive cruise, that means increasingly elaborate activities and facilities. If it’s done correctly, VR experiences could be a glamorous and unique add-on, just like ordering a back rub or late-night room service.
Or at least, that’s the thought process behind Marriott’s new “VRoom Service.”

How technology in tourism is taking travel to the next level?

The application of technology in tourism,whether it be in the vacation planning process or during the actual vacation, is changing the entire travel industry. According to Think With Google's 5 stages of travel, the average travelers visits about 22 travel related sites prior to booking a vacation and 70 percent of business travelers will check into their flights and hotels via their mobile devices. It's no wonder then that technology and tourism are becoming closely interwined.

Along the same vein, Trend Hunter has uncovered numerous ways in which travel brands and tourism boards around the world are using technology to enhance the travel experience from the point of booking to the actual vacation. As demonstrated in PRO Trends such as Tour-ovation and Virtual Globetrotting, tech related innovations in travel run the gamut and include everything from social media and hi-tech hotel campaigns to apps that act like tour guides.

For example, the Mondrian Hotel in New York City's Soho neighborhood provides each of its 270 rooms with an Ipad specifically for guests to use as a means to order food, plan their travel and coordinate transportation. The Roadside America app helps travelers uncover hidden gems and roadside attractions during their road trips, and social networking campaigns like the one launched by Mayor Buckhorn  in Tampa Bay, Florida, use social media to engage tourists. Whats more, photography innnovations such as the Tamaggo 360 imager allow consumers to capture their vacation experiences like never before.

Resourced from: http://www.trendreports.com/article/technology-in-tourism

Pros & Cons of E-Tourism

Using internet for e-tourism do bring benefits, such as the E-commerce provides new channels for the global marketing of products and services, and presents opportunities to create new businesses providing information and other knowledge-based intangible products. In 2000, Pappas has mentioned four aspects of marketing in tourism industry which have been changed by the advent of E-commerce:

1. Helps to improve the promotion of products and services through direct, interactive and rich information contact with customers.

2.      Establishes a direct online distribution channel.
3.      Causes savings in administrative and communication costs.
4.      Enhances customer service by enabling customers to find detailed information online, and by answering standard E-mail questions with intelligent agents and human expert systems.

Finally, customers need less time to find more information upon tourism products and make comparisons. While in 2001, Porter defined some other benefits include better management of information, better integration of suppliers and vendors, better channel partnership, lower transaction costs, better market understanding, and expanded geographical coverage. A report which has been gathered by Scottish parliament in 2002, has mentioned the following benefits of E-tourism:

-          It is the most cost effective way of communicating with target markets and disseminating information.

-          It is a quick and easy way for the customer to buy travel products.

-          It offers opportunities for improvements in customer service and retention through meeting and promoting individual preferences.

-          It helps to reduce costs through increased efficiency in internal operations and purchasing processes.

-          Facilitates high quality design of products and services in the tourism industry, through continuously refined information about current and potential customers to anticipate and respond to their needs.

-          Enhances the degree of externalization of some tourism services. Management information systems like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and database technologies can facilitate supplier-customer relationships and the electronic analysis and transfer of information.

-          It encourages greater co-operation amongst traditional competitors through the provision of hypertext links. Links are a cheap, quick way of raising the profile of a new site and getting round the difficulty of up-dating information in-house.

About the satisfaction in E-tourism, it has mention that E-tourism firms use internet to better serve their customers. Customer relationship management is a crucial subject which firms take special attention to, which directly or indirectly results in Customer satisfaction, Customer loyalty and finally Customer retention. Among these concepts customer satisfaction can relatively influence customer loyalty and retention which in turns increases firms profit and efficiency. CRM as a research topic has attracted much attention since the beginning of the 1990s. However, in a new E-commerce context the concept of CRM and its core subject, customer satisfaction, has not been studied sufficiently yet. This study is going to fill this gap by finding the important factors which can lead to E-satisfaction in the tourism industry.

In the previous the pros of E-Tourism was mentioned. Although E-tourism has variety of pros but on the other hand it had some cons too.  From the journal that I read from “International Journal of Advances in Management Science” (http://www.ij-ams.org), I had finalized and summary out some cons of E-Tourism. Below are the cons of E-Tourism:

Stress between growing demands for personalized services tailored to the individual’s needs, demands, interests and lack of willingness or desire to do or accept something amongst consumers to release such information over the Internet in case it is improper.

The preference of many customers to conduct complicated transactions in a face-to-face environment. Nowadays most of customers using online booking/ transaction, but some of the customer prefer face-to-face transaction, especially baby boomer because it is more trustable compare with online transaction.

In this century, technology had become people daily needs and common thing, especially internet. Nowadays, everything can be search and found online, for example google search and yahoo. So, nowadays people who want to travel can search accommodation, flight ticket, tour packages, transportation rental and etc online. This had causes travel agent business being displace, with resultant job losses.

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The impact of internet on tourism industry Since the emergence of E-commerce is very crucial for tourism firms, all of them including small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), are eager to apply that in their business. SMEs face some challenges for implementing E-tourism. It has been argued that the challenges and issues faced by the industry include limited access to technology.

Resourced by: http://www.ij-ams.org/

What is E- Tourism?

E-tourism can be defined as the analysis, design, implementation and application of IT and e-commerce solutions in the travel and tourism industry; as well as the analysis of the respective economic processes and market structures and customer relationship management. From a communication science perspective, E-tourism can be also defined as every application of information and communication technologies within both the hospitality and tourism industry, as well as within the tourism experience.

Acentic, the global leader in hospitality technology, has been chosen by Darwin Escapes to work across its portfolio of luxury in the UK. This new technology partnership follows the successful installation of a managed HSIA network service over 1000 lodges, in three of the group’s recently upgraded resorts, in the South West of the UK. Darwin Escapes is a good holiday hotel rentals for tourist in UK. Over the past year, Darwin has invested tens of millions of pounds to create some of the best holiday parks in the UK. All of their suites are beautifully maintained.

Acentic  has created a global technology template which forges high speed internet access with property wide connectivity and state of the art in-room entertainment. Technology now plays a key role in the complete guest experience, and the delivery of that technology has to be integrated and seamless if you want to meet the varied expectations of business and leisure guests. One of the advantages is the Acentic got radiant 4 HSIA: The 4^th Hospitality Utility. HSIA stands for high speed internet access and means that guest can enjoy apps, games, movies, send and receive email. Radiant 4 is the only HSIA solution you’ll even need. It caters to today’s guest and tomorrow’s hotelier, turning Wi-Fi from a problem into a selling point.

(Resourced by: Darwin Escapes https://www.darwinescapes.co.uk/ )

Then, Acentic also support in Hotel television system. Television in a hotel room is an interactive centerpiece offering entertainment, information and communication. It helps to create meaningful interactions with guests. Panorama NG is Agentic’s next generation Smart TV solution. It has been designed from the ground up to be the most flexible and powerful solution on the market. Panorama NG is works on both Coax and IP network. It is also work on smart TV. Guest can use their mobile device to control the app on the TV.

Lastly, guest can be able to use the Push and Play app via Panorama NG to securely stream music, photos and movies from their own device. It is very useful for guest and they can very enjoy in Darwin Escapes by using the technology by Acentic.

Resource by:  Hospitality Net