The industry is racing to deliver unique guest experiences fuelled by new technology.

Hotel rooms are starting to feel like they were made just for you.

Personalized music plays when you open the door. Lighting and air-conditioning are set to your ideal levels. A menu of the family’s favorite movies pop up on the TV, while the mini fridge is free from any food allergies.

Behind it all: a hotel industry racing to deliver unique guest experiences fuelled by new technologies and artificial intelligence.

“If knowing your guest is a priority to winning loyalty and increasing spend, then AI has tremendous potential in helping build guest profiles,” says JLL’s hotel asset management expert Ross Beardsell. “If a guest is known for having an exacting fitness regime, a penchant for fine dining, or a requirement for state-of-the-art technology services, using AI to build a comprehensive guest profile can allow a hotel to grow yield.”

The push for technology is happening throughout the ranks of hotels, from budget hotels for the cost-conscious with kiosk-style check-in technology, to five-star premises where technology can ensure a customised visit for the repeat visitor.
The challenge is how to leverage the right technologies to deliver a seamless experience for guests while also generating bottom-line benefits.

Howard Phung, director of digital, data and technology at Pro-Invest Group, which invests in hotels and commercial property assets on behalf of global institutional investors, says investing in agile technology is key; there is no one technology that will last forever, no “one-size-fits-all.”

“It is important to understand what problems you are solving for your customers,” Phung said at the No Vacancy hotel conference in Sydney. “If you're going to just be whacking in technology left and right, things that you saw in a magazine, it's not going to work for you. So just really taking a long-term approach. That's the key to successful technologies."

Phung and other speakers highlighted Citizen M Hotels as one example of a hotel operator making technology a focal point of its “affordable luxury” offering, designed for tech-savvy always-on-the-move guests. Citizen M swapped form-filling for self-service check-in at touch-screen terminals, and room keys double as payment method at the hotels’ canteens.
The company used an enterprise middleware with the customer data platform that houses that data, Phung said, getting the technology and architecture design just right.

The hotel check-in

Touch screen check-ins can also simplify the upselling process of offering a guest breakfast, or upgrading to a deluxe room, and QR scanning for food orders leads to guests typically ordering more than if they are served by a person. Both are “simple quick wins that are very revenue driven,” said Heidi George, director of operational excellence at TFE Hotels, at the event.

“What music people want, it's pretty hard to clarify the dollar return on that,” George said.

“But when you can see the straight revenue from an upsell, that's the simplest. QR code ordering as well. Every vendor out there will tell you when people don't have to verbally give you your order and you're just choosing online, you order more than you would if you were saying it to somebody.”