SPECIAL FEATURE: HITEC
SPECIAL FEATURE: HITEC Connectivity in the Hotel of Tomorrow David Esseryk – Vice President Guest Technology, Accor Group David Esseryk Vice President Guest Technology, Accor Group CONTACT Accor Group www.accor.com www.accorhotels.com Connectivity is a big word! We’re talking about wireless everywhere. It’s a young technology. If you remember six years ago, the question was whether to put wireless everywhere. It was a battle between wireless and RJ45 cable. We of course moved from RJ45 to wireless everywhere. The next debate was whether we need to give wireless everywhere in the hotel or not. Some years ago, you may remember in hotels wireless was only provided in the lobby area. After one or two years, wireless was available everywhere. And the last debate was “Should we give free wireless or not?” At our hotels, Wireless is free; and it’s not free because we want to give it for free, but because the guest wants to have free wireless. Today there is no more debate, because if you don’t have free wireless the guest will leave the hotel. And now, the new trend is that wireless needs to be reliable. We are not looking for wireless just to do email, we are looking for new functionalities; for video streaming and content sharing. But wireless needs not only to be reliable for the guest, but also for staff, who are looking for mobility. As hotels look to give more mobility and flexibility to the staff, all the devices, all the software we knew, like PMS, PoS, room management, these are all moving to wireless. So we are no longer talking about wireless for the guest, but for the entire hotel. So this is the new challenge for the hotel operator. What is the business model for tomorrow? How do we provide a good coverage everywhere, with consistency in the product and service? Already we are deploying mobile solutions to help meet guest needs in a better way. We are testing PMS on mobile, as well a number of other functions and we have a lot of challenges, such as how to manage different providers and solutions on the same wireless network. How do you get the same infrastructure everywhere? If you want to keep the products and services consistent you need to do that everywhere… so that is the challenge we are facing today. Another big challenge is that people expect to get the same wireless they have at home everywhere… in Africa, Asia, America or Europe. They don't People choose a BRAND and they expect the same level of service everywhere. understand, even if the technology is not available in some countries, because the Internet is not the same everywhere you cannot ask to get good wireless in the middle of nowhere as you do in continental Europe but people don't care… they choose a BRAND and they expect the same level of service everywhere. 12 Hotel & Tourism SMARTreport / Worldwide Edition N°26 / June - August 2015
Brought to you by A New Concept in Leveraging Social Media Christian Lundén – Head of Future Business in Technology, Nordic Choice Hotels Nordic Choice is working on a Unified Commerce a project that combines online, social and crowdfunding within our industry. Here we see a lot of potential and we’re working together with Facebook and Sigma to give our guests a fun way to be a part of all this. Several factors come into play. E-commerce is expected to grow rapidly within coming years. Mobile bookings grew from 0 million 2010 to billion 2013. Crowdsourcing/funding/commerce has grown from 0 million 2009 to ,8 billion 2013 and expected to be ,2 trillion 2020. And finally, hotels active in Social media are getting more business than those are not. We had noticed that a people were occasionally sending out details to social media telling their friends that they are staying at the hotel to celebrate a birthday or anniversary and having a great time, posting photos and so on. Their friends of course get back to them and wish them a good stay and so on. But we would like these other people to be able to be part of the journey as well… especially if there is something special that is being celebrated. So we thought about what we could do to enable friends to contribute to the guests stay at the hotel. Until now, the best people could do in this kind of situation was to send flowers or champagne to their friend’s room via the reception desk, but this tended to be complicated. So we decided to launch a service for guests that would leverage Facebook to create new channels of interactivity. When people reserve a room for a special occasion, they will receive a letter explaining the fact that if they send their Facebook friends a link, they will receive (…) we decided to launch a service for guests that would leverage Facebook to create new channels of interactivity. a nice surprise. The Facebook friends then receive a message explaining that they can, if they wish, contribute to giving a gift or surprise to their friend staying at the hotel. For example, if just a few contribute, it may be a bottle of wine; or if a few more contribute, it could be a bottle of champagne; or if a number of friends contribute to the surprise, it could be even a room upgrade to a suite. Then, when the guests check out, an automatic message will be sent back to their friends thanking them for the surprise. We are planning to roll this out firstly as a pilot at Nordic Light hotel where people are already used to using a lot of social media, and we believe it will really add something to the guest experience. Christian Lundén Head of Future Business in Technology, Nordic Choice Hotels CONTACT Nordic Choice Hotels Phone: +46 70 666 82 92 christian.lunden@choice.se Twitter: ChrLun www.choice.se www.cleverhotel.org Hotel & Tourism SMARTreport / Worldwide Edition N°26 / June - August 2015 13
