Has your hotel adopted the new BLACK?

When a guest walks in to your hotel to check-in, does your hotel front office staff still ask the guest to stand straight and look at the web camera that’s clipped to a chunky computer monitor?

Do you know whether your guests are nearing your hotel for a check-in?

What happens to your cloud based PMS in the event of an intermittent internet or a full disconnect for 30 minutes? (when a Billion+ user platform WhatsApp can go down for 30 minutes, wouldn’t your internet provider be on some days?)

Web looks like a thing of the past. At the same time, to say Mobile is the new black also sounds too late. Mobile has already become the new black many years ago in many verticals. But, in the context of a hotel, the mobile game is still catching up though media articles say otherwise. Mobile is still trying to become the new black in hotels.

It will become. Soon.

Why?

It’s because of the perfect blend of usecases that exist in a hotel and the native capabilities of a mobile platform that complement them.

Your hotel can be entirely mobile/tablet enabled. Below are nine native advantages of mobile/tablet platform versus the current infrastructure deployment in most of the hotels.

Size

The entire hotel’s PCs/laptops can be replaced with mobiles/tablets that are 5–5" or 9–10" screen size respectively. The front desk suddenly looks empty and clean. Restaurant POS can be replaced with a sleek stand that holds a tablet. The overall saving in space across the hotel is valuable. Size matters.

Location intelligence

A hotel’s performance DNA revolves around the guest. With mobile’s GPS or cellphone triangulation method that emits a guest’s location (with their permission), necessary preparation can be taken at the hotel even before the guest arrives. Location commerce is emerging with advent of products like Google Lens. The intelligence/insight that can be gained by guest’s location is significant.

Memory

Mobile/tablet’s inbuilt storage helps a hotel to perform its core operations like check-in, check-out, reservation even when internet is disconnected. We can have a SQL lite database in the phone’s memory that acts as a temporary storage space to perform operations offline.

Camera

The camera feature can dismiss many hardwares in a hotel — it can be the web camera, a passport scanner, documents scanner, business card reader and more. There are third party software modules available that makes a camera perfectly read documents like passport and retrieve its value to autofill check-in or reservation forms.

Voice

Calls are past. Text (read: WhatsApp) is present. Voice is the future. The conventional touch and scroll UI is slowing getting transformed into “Conversational UI”. Advancements in natural language processing (NLP) in personal assistants like Apple’s Siri, Google’s Allo are testament to the conversational UI future. Google reported that 20% of its search are already from voice input. Usecases of a mobile’s microphone in a hotel operations context deserves a separate article.

Push notification, messaging

Hotel’s overall operational efficiency can be improved significantly by alerting the right hotel staff at the right time with real-time information. Mobile’s capabilities like a push notification+sound+message will enable a hotel to achieve this. Also, enabling staff communication with a messaging/chatting platform further improves efficiency of staff.

Mobility

Being able to move around and perform daily operational activities itself results in lot of benefits to the hotel. A classic example could be a hotel staff assisting guests during check-in, check-out process. Imagine checking in a guest while walking along with him/her to the room and engaging in a conversation. This certainly has positive impact on guest experience.

Investment

PC/laptop and other related hardwares command a significant capex. Nevertheless to mention it commands opex too on an ongoing basis. A PC/laptop with a decent configuration (along with OS) would cost at least INR 30,000 or USD 500. Whereas, an equivalent 10.1" Android tablet can be purchased for INR 15,000 max resulting in 50% cost saving for the entire infrastructure needs. For a new hotel, there is also cost saving in not having a wired cabling, internet lines etc.

Security

Most of the hotel systems are run on Windows OS, and with recent incidents like WannaCry ransomware hoteliers need to constantly worry about system and data security. Compared to virus attacks on PCs, attack on mobile /tablet operating system is significantly less.

At IDS, we think mobile first for all of our new products. Our mobile solutions take advantage of above mentioned native capabilities and they are yielding results for hundreds of hotels/restaurants.

Write to easy@idsnext.com, experience our mobile suite of products for your hotel/restaurant.

Go Mobile! With IDS!