Tech Talk

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Merging High Tech With High Touch to Create a New Hospitality Paradigm
Posted: 03/23/2023

One of the key challenges facing today’s hoteliers is that of high tech vs high touch. Does technology conflict with personalized service? Is it possible to offer both during the same visit? And can hotels that utilize technology in favor of human interaction achieve guest loyalty?

Business travel is picking back up and families may be taking their first or second real vacations since the pandemic cancelled so many plans just a few years ago. To ensure that guests have the best on-site experience possible, hoteliers are increasingly looking to new technologies to make their stay more comfortable than ever. With an advanced property management systems (PMS) and integration platforms, hoteliers can increase operational and staff efficiency, but also meet changing guest expectations for a high-value but relatively low-touch experience. We looked ahead to see what changes we expect to see sweeping the hospitality industry this year.

Long-term readers of this blog know that I rarely focus on a single company or product. My goal is to help readers understand new and emerging technologies, when and why they might be useful, and what to consider if you are buying them.

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The Future of Hotels
Posted: 02/21/2023

Hotels have always been a high-touch low-tech business. Today, and into the foreseeable future, hotels are moving away from the pure ‘people serving people’ model towards a more high-tech low-touch business, and doubling down on digitalization. In the paragraphs below, I envision ways in which tech can innovate and enhance the guest experience throughout the guests’ 6 stage hotel journey: Imagine-Book-Stay-Report-Recommend-Return.

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Definitely Doug 2/10/23: Planning for June
Posted: 02/10/2023

The question I have heard most often in recent months is “where are you going in the last week of June?”. As most readers are aware, two trade shows featuring hotel technology are scheduled during the same dates that week. Many of you are still undecided which to attend. Knowing that your decision will be based at least in part on where others are going (hoteliers and exhibitors both), I decided to try to get some real data that I could share.

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OTT Entertainment Gets Personal

10/19/2016

by Mike Bitz

Entertainment makes us laugh and cry, gives us fodder for the water cooler, and brings us together, and yet it’s also a highly individual experience. Despite 21 years of marriage and a multitude of common interests, my wife will never share my obsession with Game of Thrones. In fact, everyone in our household has their own favorites – the boys like Dual Survival and YouTube videos of puzzle solvers (respectively – don’t get it wrong!), and my wife looks forward to a few quiet hours watching The Bachelor each week (which frankly I will never understand).

You likely experience the same in your own household, just as the same could be expected of other families and groups. For example, millennials, a rapidly growing demographic of much interest to the hospitality industry, often get lumped together as one. In reality, they are individuals who are making personal choices in all aspects of their lives, including entertainment. With online reviews and the preponderance of social media, their voices are loud and should be heard. But in hospitality, other voices matter too:

Visitors from locations around the world who want news from home, in their native language
Sports fans wanting to watch their team when they can’t cheer them on in person
The investor, preparing for the annual board presentation
Parents of boisterous young children looking for a few moments of silence to unpack
The business traveler who wants to enjoy that missed season finale before accidentally seeing the plot twist on Facebook
The grandparents who want to relive highlights from their day at the beach with the grandkids

Hotel guests are you, me and everyone, and we each have our own favorites. Some choices intersect while some contrast. With no two guests wanting exactly the same thing, how do we provide meaningful, personalized stays?

It Sounds Complex
When personalization is mentioned, it’s hard not to immediately think of massive databases, complicated CRM solutions, large integration projects, big development efforts and even bigger price tags. Plus, the questions begin:

How does this tie into our loyalty system?
What’s the user experience?
Are guests willing to not only opt in, but also provide enough information so that recommendations are meaningful?
How can a personalized experience be created while controlling capital and operational expenses?

The Solution is Quite Simple
Guests curate their own content daily (or even more frequently) based on advertising, friends’ recommendations, social media and other influences. With over-the-top (OTT) entertainment options increasing so rapidly, this personal content curation becomes that much more specific.

Rather than building a complicated, costly new system that pushes (hopefully) relevant information at a time when your guests are (hopefully) awake, use the personal content mining that’s already happening and give guests the control. Leverage what they already know – Chromecast, a ubiquitous consumer technology built by Google, enables guests to enjoy their OTT content on the biggest screen in the room. Content is controlled using personal devices like tablets and smartphones, which have become the “remote controls of our lives,” enabling everything from booking reservations and checking email to paying for merchandise and accessing video streaming subscriptions. Now add casting to that list: guests simply open an app and cast their favorite content to the TV, seamlessly, without entering any personal information.

With over 30 million devices sold, Chromecast is familiar technology at home, and with appropriate security and installation, can be added to virtually any existing in-room setup to deliver personalized casting experiences – for each and every one of your guests, no matter the age, no matter the hometown.

The End Game: Self-service Personalization
Change is happening. Chromecasts can already be found in thousands of hotel rooms across the United States and Canada, and guests are making it personal:

Over 210 apps cast in just 9 months
Unsurprisingly, Netflix, Hulu, HBO GO and YouTube are very popular
Sports fans (NFL, MLB), parents (Disney Movies Anywhere, YouTube Kids), international travelers (BBC, Hulu Japan, On Demand Korea), and gamers (Monopoly, Angry Birds) account for over 25 percent of usage
The music service Tidal was cast in hotel rooms the day after it debuted in app stores
Guests are spreading the word in social media posts, on comment cards, on TripAdvisor, to general managers, anytime they connect with the world.

A personalized entertainment experience is quickly shifting from ‘nice surprise’ to ‘required amenity’ and is becoming the new path to higher guest satisfaction, continued occupancy and revenue growth. Chromecast enables millennials and others, individually, to choose their own entertainment now, without requiring hotels to build costly, time-consuming solutions.

Best of all, when I travel for business, I can binge watch Game of Thrones without someone rolling her eyes – it's even better than at home!

About The Author

Mike Bitz
Vice President of Business and Technology Development
SONIFI

Mike Bitz, vice president of business and technology development at SONIFI, is focused on fostering partner relationships. He joined SONIFI in 2000 and most recently led the engineering team. Mike holds a computer science degree from Dakota State University and is based in SONIFI’s operations headquarters in Sioux Falls, S.D.