How necessary are humans to hospitality?
More than 10 years ago, I heard Barry Sternlicht, founder and former CEO of Starwood Hotels and Resorts and current developer of Baccarat and 1 Hotels, tell a collection of travel industry CEOs at a World Travel & Tourism Council Global Summit that if it weren't for human employees, he could run a flawless hotel operation.
Executives at small hotel companies need to put added focus on data security, and they can take steps to lessen the impact of data breaches. Small companies can be big targets for data breaches, and independent hoteliers need to know how to protect their business when it comes to data security.
As workers become less tethered to their desks, hotels are giving their old in-room work spaces the pink slip. Traditional, boxy desks with drawers are being replaced with more minimalist, flexible tables that can serve a multitude of purposes; laptop trays that allow guests to type away on a sofa or bed; and an abundance of electrical outlets that let travelers plug in just about anywhere. Even the well-appointed stationery, neatly placed on top of the desk, is gradually going the way of the wish-you-were-here postcard.
Hotel rooms are all the same, right? You have a bed, a bathroom, a TV, and a room service menu that entices you to order a grilled cheese sandwich at midnight. But Starwood Hotels is trying to shake things up at Aloft, Four Points hotels, by using technology to improve the guest experience. Yahoo Travel was recently invited to Starwood headquarters in Stamford, Connecticut, to check out some of the forward-thinking amenities they’re testing. And I must say, some of the things got me pretty excited.
If you find yourself at certain Starwood hotels in the next few months, you'll be able to enter your room with the tap of an iPhone or Apple Watch, touch the mirror for weather updates and even request a robot butler to bring you a toothbrush. At its Stamford, Connecticut-based headquarters, Starwood is hard at work testing concept rooms filled with smart technology that's already reached three of its chains: Four Points by Sheraton, boutique concept Aloft and its sustainable Elements brand.
IN YEARS to come we will look back at hotels that charged for Wi-Fi with a kind of incredulous nostalgia. But how far in the future will that be? So far, only one big hotel chain, Hyatt, has—belatedly—been won over by the idea of free, no-strings-attached access for all its customers. A few others, like InterContinental and Starwood, have taken tentative steps, though they are not yet willing to commit fully. Their free access comes with demands, such as insisting guests join loyalty programmes or book via the hotel’s own website, rather than Expedia and the like.
For Phil McAveety, executive vice president and chief brand officer for Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide,s the 200 people who brainstorm in the company’s newly opened brand, design and digital innovation office in New York City are all about unlocking potential. Starlab is a design-led incubator that looks and feels like a start-up digital hospitality company. The workspaces are next-generation and the trappings inspirational with art, mood boards and a social-media ticker displaying the latest tweets from the company’s nine hotel brands.
Chip Conley tries to make sure that guests using the online room rental service have a smooth stay as the company tries to become full-fledged hospitality business. If Chip Conley misses anything about staying at hotels, it’s room service. Waiters delivering pasta dinners to guest rooms is a dying convenience because hotels lose money doing so. “Guests who use room service love it, but its future is not looking good,” Conley says. In April, Conley, a hotel industry veteran, traded “institutionalized” amenities like room service for apartment rental website Airbnb. His job is to make sure Airbnb users are happy whether they rent someone’s college crash pad, a cozy condo or a seaside mansion in Hawaii.
Despite the crash of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo during a test flight Friday, killing co-pilot Michael Alsbury, the company’s founder Richard Branson says, “the risk is worth it.” “Mike would have been the first to say that,” Branson told CNN Monday. “Test pilots would say that because they know the risk they’re taking, they know the importance of what they’re doing, we know the importance of what we’re doing.” And the British entrepreneur confirmed that he would still be the first passenger on Virgin Galactic’s maiden space tourism flight.
Think hotels are deliberately blocking your personal Wi-Fi networks so you'll buy theirs? No, it's not just a conspiracy theory. It turns out the federal government is concerned about it, too. Marriott has agreed to pay a $600,000 fine after the Federal Communications Commission found the company blocked consumer Wi-Fi networks last year during an event at a hotel and conference center in Nashville.
techcrunch.com interviews Savioke's CEO Steve Cousins and Starwood's Global Brand Leader Brian McGuinness. The merry TechCrunch band took a trip to Cupertino last week to kick it with a small robot called Botlr made by robotics startup Savioke. The little android, outfitted with a fancy collar and racing stripes, brings small items from the front desk of the Aloft hotel, to the rooms of customers. The cute R2 can handle elevators on its own, and scoots along at around one to two miles per hour. The Botlr is the first of its fleet, and is still in testing. We put it through its paces, tasking it with the delivery of a little something that hails from the South to room 335.
Chip Conley is a veteran of the hospitality world. Since the 1980s, he’s been a hotelier, having started the Joie de Vivre Hospitality group and the numerous hotels under its umbrella. After selling the company, and many of his hotels, Conley has been working as the head of global hospitality for home sharing service Airbnb. He still owns 10 hotels and an additional eight with a partner, including the recently opened Epiphany hotel in Palo Alto. He sat down to talk to us about the state of the hospitality business, his latest venture and why hotels and Airbnb can coexist.
A Marriott executive at the Mcommerce Summit: State of Mobile Commerce 2014 last week said that the international hotel brand is making changes to its approach to customer experience by accounting for a predicted 76 percent increase in consumers ages 18 to 40 within six years. “When we launched these capabilities, we had 329 hotels equipped for the service. In a single day, 240,000 mobile check-ins were initiated, the largest single brand launch of this type of service,” said Vikas Chawla, vice president of mobile and digital guest experience, Marriott Hotels, Bethesda, MD.
Jim Holthouser has seen plenty of change during his 35 years in the hotel business. He told 125 attendees of last week’s 16th Annual Lodging Industry Update in Memphis that even he hasn’t seen anything yet. The speed and scope of change is more prevalent than ever, said Holthouser, Hilton Worldwide Holdings’ executive VP of global brands. Neither of those components is going to slow any time soon, he added before outlining five changes coming soon to hotels. “You better have a pretty good idea of what’s around the corner,” he said. “The solution can take 10 years in this business. Sometimes that’s too long for the customer.”
Today’s traveling public is used to sophisticated technology at home. And we want it in our hotel rooms, too. Let’s start with that TV, which, along with the bed, may be one of the major focal points of your home away from home. Surveys conducted by Hilton Worldwide indicate that guests want their hotel TV to be on the upscale side of things. “It needs to be a modern, nice TV set of a certain size or bigger,” says Josh Weiss, the company’s vice president of brand and guest technology. Flat-panel is a plus.
Whenever I go through the contents of my wallet, I always find a few plastic hotel room keycards. I know you’re not supposed to keep them but I often manage to accidentally. Each inactivated keycard is a symbol of an experience, one specific, unrepeatable moment in time—a New Jersey snowstorm, a Seattle conference, a Baltimore fling. Every small, cheap, rectangular bit of logo-boasting plastic in my wallet serves as a reminder that, for at least one night in my past, I was somewhere different. But my nostalgic bit of plastic is about to be a thing of the past.
White Lodging, a company that maintains hotel franchises under nationwide brands including Hilton, Marriott, Sheraton and Westin appears to have suffered a data breach that exposed credit and debit card information on thousands of guests throughout much of 2013, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. whitelodgingEarlier this month, multiple sources in the banking industry began sharing data indicating that they were seeing a pattern of fraud on hundreds of cards that were all previously used at Marriott hotels from roughly March 23, 2013 on through the end of last year. But those sames sources said they were puzzled by the pattern of fraud, because it was seen only at specific Marriott hotels, including locations in Austin, Chicago Denver, Los Angeles, Louisville and Tampa.
Jeff Pearce rarely takes advantage of the hotel business center when he travels for work. When he does, it's usually to print out a boarding pass. Yet the Fayetteville, Ga., resident, who owns a water and wastewater service company, wouldn't want to stay somewhere that didn't have a business center. "When I need something, I absolutely need it and do not want to have to go to Kinko's," says Pearce, a USA TODAY Road Warrior, a panel of frequent travelers who weigh in on travel topics.
Guests arriving at the Aloft Hotel in Manhattan or one in Silicon Valley will soon be able to do something hotels have dreamed about offering for years: walk past the check-in desk and enter their rooms by using a smartphone as a room key. The boutique hotel brand from Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc. plans to offer this feature at two hotels, in the Harlem neighborhood and in Cupertino, Calif., before the end of the quarter.
From minibars to pillow menus to 24-hour butlers, today's hotels have turned every indulgence and convenience into a standard necessity. But this wasn't always the case. Not long ago, those little shampoo bottles that people now love to swipe didn't even exist. Nor did in-room iPads or fingerprint recognition technology. Oh, the humanity! Thankfully, over the last 100 years some innovative hotels have helped pave the way for these modern accommodation marvels. Because of their foresight and progressiveness, these ground-breaking properties forever changed the future of the industry, enabling guests to expect -- and demand -- increasingly more.