By Claus Hetting, WiFi NOW CEO & Chairman
What can hoteliers do to stand out in a highly competitive market? WorldVue’s COMPASS – launched earlier this year – allows guests to use their phones to interact with room settings, entertainment services, and more. The solution is part of a wider WorldVue strategy to craft personalised guest experiences while delivering effective network monitoring and control services to property owners and operators, the company says.
Houston-based managed services provider WorldVue is taking a leap forward into delivering personalised guest services: Guests at participating hotels can now personalise in-room entertainment and – for example – control temperature and other room settings from a COMPASS customised webpage on their phones. The new solution is an evolution of WordVue’s TV app for hotels, the company says.
“The phone is the obvious interface to use for guests to access hotel services and in-room controls. Especially many of the larger hotel brands now require that managed network services integrate control of thermostats and in-room electrical appliances for energy management, which means that we can now also offer similar guest-facing features via COMPASS. In time COMPASS will include location services and wayfinding,” says Mark Schaps, EVP and Chief Information Officer at WorldVue.
Currently the COMPASS web application – which loads with a QR-code – also supports casting of own content and remembers your preferences for your next stay. The platform allows for advertising by for example nearby entertainment venues and restaurants and is fully customisable to the hotel operator’s brand and preferences. It even features the hotel’s own ChatGPT-style question and answer prompt for AI-based customer service, WorldVue says.
Importantly, COMPASS is not an app, which means guests don’t need to go through the tedious process of downloading yet another app that ends up cluttering their phones. Instead COMPASS works immediately and securely via QR-code authentication and setup, which makes for easier and wider adoption by hotels and their guests, the company says.
ATLAS: A single, aggregated network operations portal
Meanwhile – on the network side – WorldVue will soon be introducing another significant innovation: A new in-house developed network operations platform allowing property owners and operators to monitor and control Wi-Fi and other network services for all venues from a single dashboard. The new hardware-agnostic platform is called ATLAS and will be introduced this January, WorldVue says.
“Thankfully most Wi-Fi and other vendors today offer APIs, which means we can extract data from the networks of pretty much any vendor and aggregate these into our new ATLAS platform. We believe that an accurate, aggregated view of network operations will be of huge value to our clients, and we’ll be offering this at no additional cost. ATLAS will be able to harvest data and use AI-based methods to keep track of – for example – current and predicted network health,” Mark Schaps says.
WorldVue has also been one of the first MSPs to adopt OpenWiFi as a preferred networking technology although getting hotel brands to accept open source networking technology has required a lot of evangelism, Mark Schaps says. “We believe there are big benefits in adopting open source platforms. These include lower costs and the opportunity to incorporate features designed for hospitality. But the shift to open source has required a lot of awareness build and education towards our clients. After introducing the concept about 18 months ago, we’re now seeing real traction on OpenWiFi,” he says.
Also don’t miss WorldVue’s President and COO Rober Grosz speaking at our OpenWiFi industry update live webinar on December 16 – register to view here.
/Claus.
