Technology

I personally think robots is a far stretch for hotels. I do however think that automation and self service will make its move into Hotels at a faster pace than previously, for 2 reasons: First, it's what guest want. You can do anything on a phone, so why not check in to your hotel room, buy an upgrade or order room service, the guest "becomes it's own robot" so to speak, tasks done previously by hotel staff are now done by the guest.

Whether we like it or not, hospitality is fast becoming a tech industry now. Robotics, AI, mobility, IoT devices and contactless check-in tech are being adopted across the industry at a very fast clip. The digital transformation is already changing the industry and the current crisis have accelerated it by 7 years (McKinsey & Company).

Robots No!, No!, No! so no R2D2 coming soon in a hotel. But automation yes as a first step. Hospitality is ripe for RPA and many benefits can be taken from that. Maybe one day physical robots will in hotels but positioning this as a labour cost reduction option and really seeing this wrongly.

Post-crises, only those hoteliers will succeed who a) understand that we are dealing with exceedingly tech-savvy customers who are even more tech-demanding compared to just a year ago - the pandemic has accelerated digital transformation by as much as 7 years (McKinsey), and b) invest in technology to ensure contactless guest experience and improve operational efficiencies via automation, AI, IoT and robotization to lower labor costs, now consuming as much as 87% of RevPAR (CBRE).

Adding digital interaction guests should continue to come more and more to the forefront for hotels, as that is what guests want. Guest, like any other human being, like to be in control. With their phone, they can. A simple innovation is converting the offerings of an early arrival and late departures from often complimentary last-minute front desk discussions to pre-arrival digital offerings.

I am of the view that a significant technology shift is on the cusp of the broader hospitality industry. The catalyst, as Martin points out, is the customer/guest and the world that they are living in. The further we progress the overall hospitality experience, in a digital sense it will become an extension of the guests' life as compared to a step away from their existing lives.

AR is present in different areas of our life today, even on its most trivial aspects: think about the explosion of Pokémon Go, a game with over 60M active users every month. Some hotels have ridden this "gamification" wave, transforming into "Pokétel." AR is also used to offer unique experiences, as in the case of "Le Petit Chef," an application created by SkullMapping, which lets you enjoy your dinner while it is "cooked" by an animated Chef on your plate.

In the wake of new technology adoption due to COVID we are at the perfect place for adoption of Augmented reality. New guest experiences can be created and new revenue streams become available with this technology. Marketing and entertainment spring to mind as great starting points, tours and navigation as well as these have been tried and tested already and of course F&B could really leverage on this technology.

The pandemic propels the hospitality industry to innovate and offer new and exciting ways for guests' experience. As the industry seeks to upsell, enhance their guest experience and service offerings to stimulate demands, AR becomes an extremely valuable hotel technology during this recovery period.

In short, yes, but the problem hotels will have is the quality of the data and getting it into a repository in a meaningful, normalized, standardized way. Many legacy hotel systems are hell-bent on not allowing hotel staff to get at their own data, at least not at a reasonable cost.

Before data scientists can to their job properly we need to find structured ways of collecting and consolidating our data. It's true that we have a lot of data floating around our industry but it still sits in many different places and even the ownership of the data is unclear.

Data scientists or “Data whisperers” will be a key part of successful hotels in the future. Data-driven decisions will become the norm and gut feeling and the “we have always done it that way” will disappear. As we are getting better with technology and the acceleration of adoption has happened because of COVID-19, we must start utilizing the data that is available to us both internally and also externally.

My top 5: 1). Session specific: As these will be online, make the sessions very specific. So not “what will be the future of hotel wireless infrastructure” but “what will WIFI 6 mean for your hotel guests and the three things you need to know”.

Thanks HFTP for virtualizing this year's edition of HITEC! It would have been very hard, especially for non-US based hoteliers to join this year for obvious reasons. What I have enjoyed most at HITECs in the past was the opportunity to network, catch up with old friends, and make new connections (remember the HotSOS parties?).

In my view, the trickiest part of Cyber HITEC will be the organization and online presentation of the trade show. Keynote speeches, sessions, workshops, and seminars can easily be organized via online conferencing technology like Zoom.