GuestSpan Speaks!

I’ve talked to a lot of hotel managers and owners, and when it comes to new technology the biggest barrier is not actually price – it’s installation.  Literally, you can offer your new gizmo for free, and they’ll turn you down; but when you tell them how easy installation is, they seem to perk right up.  This is why software-as-a-service (SAAS) is so cool: all the hard parts have already been handled.

Take GuestSpan’s digital concierge, iRoom, for example.  iRoom takes ten minutes to install at a property.  And by ten minutes, I mean it takes ten minutes for GuestSpan to call your property’s wireless administrator, email them the web link, and confirm that it’s running correctly.  Poof – iRoom is now bringing local information to all your hotel’s internet users, and you spent that time drinking coffee.

Do I need new equipment for iRoom?

If you’ve got wireless internet, you’ve got iRoom.

Does it use up any of my bandwidth?

Nope.

What if we want to add our own content, or make recommendations to our guests?

Great! Send us your content, and we’ll have it updated in about ten minutes.

How will you update new information?

We manage live data feeds that automatically update at every location.

What if iRoom is temporarily out of service for any reason?

Your internet is still running; your guests simply move on to their emails.

What about information security?

We have supermen protecting our stuff, and hackers can’t get to you through us anyway.

What about hardware security?

Our gear is stored in a secure location in the Western United States.  You can have a tornado, and you’ll still have iRoom.

What about terrorists, aliens or apocalyptic fire storms?

See above about our supermen.

What about –

What about –

What about –

What about –

Relax, it’s handled.  Now go to that mix-n’-mingle your admin scheduled for you.

First, let me tell you that international travel is easy. The vast majority of the human population has good taste in food, they don’t like to run over pedestrians, and 70% of all billboards feature pretty faces and cell phones.

Beijing is my Paris. There’s a surging optimism in the air, mixed with old-world charm and the brick-and-mortar feel of Philadelphia, and all of that in a city four times the size of New York. These are my top ten excuses to go back, again and again:

1. South Beauty, a restaurant so good I started looking for jobs in Beijing
2. That really cool tepanyaki place that Vinny took us to
3. That really cool Tibetan restaurant that our guide showed us
4. That really cool Uighur restaurant Vinny showed us on Ghost Street
5. The Forbidden City tour, thanks to our guide
6. The Badaling section of the Great Wall, again thanks to our guide
7. The Peking Duck restaurant, courtesy of one of my professors
8. The Pearl Market (much better than the Silk Market), where I got a great deal on some silk and pearls for my wife and daughter
9. The Brown Door, a restaurant Denny and I accidentally found next to the Pearl Market
10. The Chinese acrobat show, which our guide found for us – you know, the one where twelve girls ride around the stage on a single bicycle? Check it out on youtube, it’s pretty darn fun.

If you’ll notice, almost everything on the list was something that someone else showed me. If I had been flying solo, I would have been stuck with hotel food (and prices!), no idea how to shop for anything, and nothing to do but watch the news. There was a Starbucks right next to my hotel, by the way. It was fine, but it didn’t make the Top Ten list. Oh, and the front desk people were unbelievably charming, but their English wasn’t superb, so getting local information from them was still a challenge.

If only there had been some kind of technology available in my room where I could explore the city – not all of it, maybe just what’s within a three-mile radius – and see if I could venture out on my own…

Now, here’s a fun puzzle – try replacing “Beijing” with “Omaha” and see how quickly this article translates to your last business trip experience.

[NOTE: I emailed Vinny, to see if I can get the names of those other restaurants, which I’ll post when he replies.]

Ten years ago, “bringing the hotel industry into the 21^st Century” meant finding a way to patch your Springer-Miller System together with your GuestWare and your Delphi – and when the IT department had trouble integrating the three, you had to hold inter-departmental meetings to coordinate everyone’s data.  This was better than the old-school paper trail?  The argument was always a long shot, because old-school managers have all the time in the world see if a new technology will float.

We’re now ten years into the 21^st Century, and some hotel properties are still using paper to manage their guest accounts – and the computer monitors at the front desk might have LCD screens, but come behind the counter and you’ll see more DOS and dot matrix than most hoteliers would care to admit.

Historically, the hotel industry side-stepped the “new technology imperative,” and waited to see what would happen.  Most people would be tempted to criticize hoteliers, because now they have a lot of old-fashioned infrastructure.  However, what they don’t have is a legacy burden of obsolete technology.  In a market as mature and competitive as the hospitality industry, “incremental increases in profit margin” are simply not a compelling argument.  If you want to introduce new technology into their world, you’ve got to be willing make a serious impact; otherwise it’s not worth taking seriously.

Well…how serious does “zero impact on existing infrastructure” sound?  That’s the kind of magic that software as a service (SAAS) can make for the hotel industry.  All hoteliers had to do was to wait until technology caught up to them. SAAS now provides a way to access 21^st Century technology without such a large capital investment.  Want a “hotel in a box” or “telecom in a box”?  With SAAS, you don’t even need to buy the box – you just plug into it.

Here are five great examples of SAAS technology in the hotel industry:

Again – 21^st Century technology, zero impact on infrastructure…I think the waiting is done.

This week, I read with interest the press release from Marriott touting its award for the Courtyard GoBoard.

Read the article HERE

The content is good and the application is generating interest.  From most accounts, the GoBoard starts out as a curiosity for guests, but their appreciation level grows as they use the simple touch screen interaction.

Hoteliers generally want to proclaim that their guest service staff sets them apart and provides value to the traveler.  Surely, this is the focus of hotel management day in and day out.

So, what happens when you provide less personal service and more technology solutions?

It would seem that this is a good combination, especially among the upcoming, tech-focused generations.

Does a guest receive a favorable interaction point with the hotel just through a touch screen information source?  Yes.

Does this pattern provide lower-tier hotels with the ability to add service and compete with some of the higher-end brands?  Yes.

Is this advance in guest service technology good for the industry?

In a word, yes.

Keep your eye on the merger of technology through kiosks, smartphones, and services provided through the guest laptop.  It’s what we do every day and the market is growing by the minute.

How many different services and advertising channels can you pack into one television? HITEC in Austin provided us with dozens of vendors that seek to make money through televisions installed in hotel rooms.

And, most of it is just garbage. At least, that’s what the Marriott hoteliers are telling us.

These vendors are trying to feed advertising, hotel information and paid content through the primary entertainment device. For the most part, their value proposition is poor. The television can’t carry all of those businesses. Unfortunately, it is an easy target for expanded services simply because it already exists in every room and tapping into an unused channel is too tempting for vendors.

The problem with TV content providers is that people aren’t looking for information there. When a business traveler turns on the TV, they are heading toward a specific channel or program. So what if Lodgenet is the default channel to pop up? They are one remote control click away from being invisible and irrelevant. Usage and linger rates show that Lodgenet appeals to a very, very small subset of travelers overall. Some people check their bill on the TV. Others order the occasional movie. But, about 98% of hotel guests flip right past those information channels and never return.

These vendors suffer from the same problem that all of those sponsor-driven internet access sites experience; the kind that immediately take the user to the sponsor’s screen upon logging in. When I head to the internet, I’m likely headed there for a purpose (check email, sports, maps, etc…). When the sponsor screen pops up, I don’t even see it. I’m headed toward my destination and that sponsor screen isn’t even a speed bump along the way. When I turn on my laptop, I’ have a purpose and that’s where I’m going.

Same thing with Lodgenet and the other hotel service guides that feed through the television. When I turn on the TV in the hotel room, even if I don’t know the specific channel to watch, I know I’m looking for entertainment and channels that sell me stuff are rarely entertaining.

The best chance I saw at HITEC was a couple of companies that provide scrolling television programming guides. They have timed the guides to take a while and the most appealing stations are always at the end of the list. While the guide scrolls, advertisements are shown. Because they provide useful information, they have the highest likelihood of attracting eyeballs for a few minutes each day. (For an entertaining conversation, call HotelGuide and ask them how they feel about the fact that EGSTV guys broke off and formed a competing service. Three words: “Bitter Cat Fights.”)

In the next couple of posts, I’ll give my thoughts on the proper place for providing information and putting advertising in front of hotel guests.

In the meantime, happy traveling.

Chris and I attended the Hitec trade show in Austin, TX last week. It was a very interesting experience after being severely spammed for the previous two weeks by seemingly every technology vendor in the hospitality space. It seems that technology is trying to creep into every space in the hotel. Whether it be using your cell phone as your room key, video concierges in the lobby, new and improved room safes and mini-bars, or super control centers for the entire hotel room there are companies trying to automate every part of the hotel experience. And that doesn’t even begin to cover the number of backend operating, management and tracking systems we say at the show.

Attending this show one might be convinced that the modern day hotel was the bastion of technological advancement. However, reality is quite the opposite. For instance, the hotel we stayed at in Austin offered free internet and even had a digital city guide in the lobby, but that was about the extent of the technology offered. The room key was still a plastic card advertising Pizza Hut, the room safe was still fairly basic and that’s more than I can say about the TV service. All in all hotels are still slow in adopting new technologies. I think that is changing, but not as rapidly as I or my colleagues in the industry would like to see. Our role is going to have to be identifying “stepping stone” technologies that allow hotels to advance technologically without biting off more than they are ready for.

A good example of these technologies was services delivered through the television. Ten years ago this was an innovative approach to guest services. The problem now is that guests are more technologically advanced than their hotel rooms and TV is not where it’s at. With services such as Netflix downloadable movies on demand guests no longer need the TV in their room for entertainment. Not to mention the usage rates are very low. It is now time for the next step in the evolution of guest services technology. This may seem self aggrandizing, but that is exactly the mission of GuestSpan. We are offering a solution that is more on par with what guests are used to and something that hotels can implement and embrace without having culture shock.

It is going to be interesting to see the evolution of hospitality technology. GuestSpan will be there as a part of it for sure.