Isn't it about time that hotels caught up with technology ?

Hotels are something that most people only get to enjoy a few times a year.

Many of us re visit the same hotels if we have had an exceptional experience and loved the ambiance and facilities. Most people fail to make the most of everything that either the hotel or destination has to offer due to lack of knowledge or time to spend on discovery.

In the first wave of digital disruption, hotel and flight aggregators and OTA’s changed the game enabling faster, one stop access to a huge choice of hotels and (at least on the surface) preferred pricing. However, the actual experience of travelling once you board a flight and arrive in destination remains little different to decades ago. You are at the mercy of whether you have helpful airport staff, taxi drivers, front desk staff and concierges and beyond some attempts at promoting loyalty at the high end, most folk are treated identically.

Technology has radically changed what is possible when it comes to customer experience, yet many hotels are still yet to fully recognise, let alone realise the benefits.

Travelling is a deeply meaningful experience, one that people save up for years for and pin their hopes and dreams on. Famously someone said that travel is the only thing that we buy that makes us richer. Why then is the customer experience often so hit-and-miss and too often left to serendipity ? 

Once a customer has checked in to a hotel too often that have no further engagement with the hotel until they leave. What a lost opportunity to build a meaningful relationship and add value. The OTA’s have no personal contact with the guest yet by leveraging clever marketing, analytics and fairly vanilla loyalty schemes, they win the customer. As the Expedia CEO said provocatively recently, hotels only have themselves to blame if they have a guest in their hotel for 2-3 nights and do not use this opportunity to build a stronger relationship. However, if one looks through the eyes of a hotel GM, running a hotel is a time intensive and expensive business - significant fixed assets and costs alongside fluctuating occupancy rates and reducing yield make for a challenging balancing act. Whilst some of the hotel chains have invested more in systems, much of the tech stack is legacy and is not interoperable, as IT people would say. For an independent hotel or collection of hotels, mastering technology, data analytics and marketing is a big ask. The behind-the-scenes operations of a hotel dominates every waking moment and these disciplines are not skill sets that naturally reside back of house.

This is where technology could, should and indeed can play a significant role . The opportunity is clear - to enhance the experience for the traveller whilst also enabling the hotelier to better serve their needs and be that helpful companion, by finding more effective and efficient ways to engage and deliver. So the question is how ?

Firstly by building a better picture of what the traveller is looking for before they book. By capturing personal data (with necessary opt ins of course) and using this to personalise the type of hotels served up and build recommendation engines that personalise the ancillary extras that turn a stay from a room booking in to an experience.

Unlike many consumer transactions, travel is intrinsically linked to our human instinct to seek out belonging and self actualisation (Maslow’s hierarchy of needs) - it’s a deeply personal and purposeful pursuit yet too often the actual experience is cold and impersonal.

Many travellers spend hours researching the best things to do whilst in destination ahead of travelling. Many are too busy with work and family commitments to get the chance to do so. Both groups deserve better and technology certainly has the ability to provide more tailored recommendations based on the profile, interests and risk appetite.

Secondly, by making the most of the most important element of the trip, namely the time in destination. Most visitors, in particular to city destinations, are complete virgins or only know of the obvious tourist spots. Some are lucky to have a helpful concierge but again this is hit and miss. Some will pay through the nose for a guide to show them the hidden delights of the city they have chosen. But why can not every traveller be enabled through technology to “travel like a local” and uncover those delights that make travelling the most enriching experience known to man ?

Whilst it’s generally the time spent outside of the hotel that enriches, technology can also enhance the time spent in the hotel. Guests want convenience and flexibility that suits their plans. Restaurant, spa bookings and in room dining are generally inflexible and require precious minutes spent at the front desk or on the phone. Many guests will have language difficulties or anxieties about speaking to/calling hotel staff; accessing these services via digital platforms enables everyone to partake and saves time.

So let’s imagine that the booking experience and the in-hotel experience have been done well and delighted the guest. The customer experience does not stop here. When a guest checks out of hotel, they will likely get a generic email asking for them to review the hotel but nothing that reminds them of the fun they had and rarely anything that prompts the guest to retain a relationship with the hotel in the future. Loyalty schemes exist in many of the big chains but guests rarely express delight - either they feel the rewards are not relevant to them or they can’t redeem their points. Herein lies a huge opportunity for hotels to use data collected across the journey to personalise the types of rewards that guests can access. Again, not a hotel’s core business but a mobile first loyalty scheme that personalises rewards and offers to the guests of a hotel could transform repeat business.

So we have established there is much that can be done in this space. Even Amazon has woken up to this opportunity, recently announcing that it is launching a tailored Alexa smart speaker service for hotels, partnering with Marriott. This is Amazon’s second attempt at cracking hotels after a trial in The Wynn in Las Vegas. Amazon moving in to this space shows that there is a growing market here. Tink Labs has been ploughing these fields globally for over 6 years (2 in the UK) and is already in present in 600,000 rooms globally. With its growing suite of technology and services it is looking to address and improve the pre, during and post hotel experience. Building technology and solutions for hotels is all we do, every day.

Here at Tink Labs we see so much opportunity to re-imagine the guest experience by deploying technology and services that work in the background to make the lives of the hotelier and their staff easier. Hotels operations sucks so many hours on non-value adding activities. From my conversations with hotel owners and GMs of late, they truly value the opportunity to engage with their guests but also yearn for solutions which help them automate costly manual functions such as check in, check out, billing, in room-dining and housekeeping. We carefully design technology that connects these disparate systems, streamlines and applies innovation to solving decade-old problems. It is critical to me that we are focusing on solving the right problems in the right order so I will be building a hotel advisory board where we can capture feedback and insight.

I would therefore love to hear from any hoteliers on:

1)   Whether you think the above is a fair assessment ? Are you doing all you can to delight your guests and make their experience as frictionless as possible ?

2)   Which pain points are your biggest priority for you to solve ?

#handytogether we will solve them.