Voice assistant, reception robot, personalized room … The hospitality industry is transforming to best meet the customer needs. The sector digitalisation also makes it possible to optimize costs in many areas. Hxperience highlights several key aspects of this evolution through a customer case, the AccorInvest group.
For some time now, voice assistants have found their place among individuals. We estimate for example that about 30% of American households will live in connected homes in the next few years. In this context, these people are likely to demand the same quality level or even to have higher expectations when they stay in a hotel.
The hotel tomorrow will therefore need to be:
- A connected place that enhances and enriches the customer experience
- A safe place and a source of well-being
- A place with a reduced environmental footprint
Hotel owners and operators are therefore facing multiple different challenges :
- Differentiate with an ever more innovative service offering
- Minimize the carbon footprint, through to the reduction of consumption and waste produced in hotels,
- Guarantee the safety and quality of services delivered to hotel guests
- While optimizing costs, especially those related to energy (water, gas, electricity).
Connected hotels ensuring a customized guest experience
A few months ago, The Louvre Hotels Group launched a new label “Smart Hotel” whose main objective is to use new technologies to promote interactions in the hotel. Designed by the “Innovation Center” department, a connected hotel has already been inaugurated in the heart of Shanghai and eventually all the group brands will be eligible to obtain this label if they meet the defined specifications. In the United States, the Hilton and Marriot hotel chains are also testing the beta version of a connected room. And in France, many hotels already offer dematerialized keys.
In a few years time, the Internet of Things (IoT) will allow hotel owners to simplify the customer journey and meet their needs. These include automated check-in desks, mobile room keys, helping robots, the use of QR Code to track meal orders, voice assistants, mobile apps, and more. The hotel guest will be able to control his room comfort: adjust the temperature, control the opening of curtains, turn on some lights and adjust the room light intensity, adjust the indoor air quality, put music on etc. .
The customer will be able to predefine his preferences (through an application for example) and get into an ultra-personalized room.
The next step will be, through the collected data, to predict the customer’s needs and thus offer him or her tailor-made services with high added value. Anticipating the guest needs is essential for hotel manager who have to foster their creativity in order to retain their customers.
Connected hotels : valuable data to optimize Operation & Maintenance work
The IoT should ultimately not only manage the comfort in rooms and the hotel building as a whole, but also address other current issues – economic, health, environmental and human, which are faced by hotel operators. Today it is estimated, for example, that the building O&M costs represent 75% of its TCO (Total Cost of Ownership). In a hotel, the energy expenditures in the broad sense (water, gas, electricity) are particularly high.
This is why a Smart Building solution such as SMATI from HXperience, based on IoT and data analysis and tailored to the specific needs of the hotel operations, provides an economically and technically reliable answer to the hotel operators challenges.
This solution, which has been put in place by the AccorInvest group, makes it possible to collect data related to water, gas and electricity consumption, to monitor hot water and cold rooms temperatures, air quality within the hotel and to correlate all of this information together with hotel activity data in order to produce relevant performance indicators for the hotel manager and his maintenance teams.
To collect, analyse et value data in order to improve building’s operations
Through data collection and analysis, operators have access to a wealth of information about the life of the building. They make it possible to identify the causes of overconsumption or operational malfunctions and to correct them. Following the implementation of SMATI in dozens of hotels, AccorInvest plans to save tens of millions of euros across the group, with savings of up to around 30,000 euros for a single hotel over a year through the identification and repair of water leaks.
By setting up alarms and notification mechanisms in the event of critical equipment failure (such as domestic hot water, air handling unit, cold units, etc.), the maintenance teams can act as quickly as possible and thus avoid a significant impact on the guest safety or comfort as well as the loss of turnover associated with customer dissatisfaction.
Prediction helps customer service performance and customization
By analyzing the historical data collected and stored, the operators can, in a second step, adapt his hotel business to their customers changing needs. The introduction of Artificial Intelligence will allow them on the one hand to anticipate possible technical problems that may arise within the hotel as well as to predict certain usage in order to offer more personalized services.
SmartBuilding solutions are technically and economically adapted to any type of hotel
To be able to adapt to all hotel sizes, typologies and locations, as well as local standards, the online monitoring solutions need to be cost-effective, modular and customizable, which is now made possible by applying new technologies such as IoT, LoraWan type of networks as well as predictive analytics features. The SMATI solution developed by HXperience can be deployed in a 2 or 3 stars hotel chain, a palace or a large hotel, a new construction or a renovation and that is the reason why the AccorInvest group decided to roll it out on his entire hotel base.
To watch Arnaud Patat Senior Vice President Digital, Construction & Innovation AccorInvest video testimonial
To know more about our SMATI solution, please contact our expert team.