By Claus Hetting, WiFi NOW CEO & Chairman
The future hotel guest experience will be steeped in intelligent, near-instantaneous convenience at every point of the guest journey – and Wi-Fi will form its backbone, said WorldVue President & COO Robert Grosz at WWC Geneva last month. Property owners, brands, and guests will all benefit from the new paradigm. But intense industry collaboration will be required to create the solutions and bring them to market, he said.
The opportunity to transform the hotel guest experience and deliver immense value to all hotel industry stakeholders is palpable – but requires intense cross-industry collaboration and integration. For guests it is about enjoying personalised digital experiences at every point of the journey from arriving in the airport until you’re comfortably installed in your room. For brands and building owners it is about operational efficiency to drive down costs. This was WorldVue’s key message at WWC Geneva last month.
“Creating a new hotel experience paradigm is ultimately about delivering value beyond the commodity race, which is a race to the bottom. New value has to come from using new technologies connected by Wi-Fi to incorporate guest convenience, comfort, and personalisation at every opportunity, but with equal focus on what hotel financiers and operators want and need,” said Robert Grosz.
The complete wireless digital transformation of the hotel industry is complex and involves for example understanding guest preferences for in-room entertainment, room services, even heating and cooling, as well as easily staying connected and using multiple personal devices as part of the connected experience. All of this should tie at least into hoteliers’ loyalty programs and CRM systems on the back end, Robert Grosz said.
“An important feature is making purchases frictionless via the guest’s phone, making sure guests are authenticated securely, and even using Wi-Fi to determine guest location for additional services and convenience. But what adds to the complexity is that hotels are very different, so we need intelligent solutions that check all the boxes but at the same time are flexible and can adapt to the hotel brands and owners’ preferences,” he said.
Meanwhile smart property management is critical for hotel operational efficiency. This includes optimised control of HVAC, lighting, sensors, and security systems – and perhaps even correlating this with knowledge of guest locations and preferences. A reliable and responsive Wi-Fi network must be there to form the backbone of digital hotel operations including sophisticated IoT use cases, Robert Grosz said.
He also highlighted the need for continuing and expanding the work on technical standards that can meet a host of new requirements in hospitality and MDUs (although the two are vastly different markets). Such standards need to be open enough to address the connectivity, service, and operational needs of hotels and MDUs all over the world, but also general enough to open up for global markets, he said.
“We should be thinking about how we can collaborate with leaders in AI, quantum computing, & blockchain to bring their input into our strategic thinking for the future and vice versa. These technologies are changing the world and we should be part of that change. The world will look very different ten years from now, and Wi-Fi will be part of that,” said Robert Grosz.
/Claus.
