Using IoT to improve the Hospitality Industry
IoT has demonstrated to be extremely beneficial for companies delivering a valued service. The technology has helped employees better understand trends and patterns of the public, and also gain a deeper insight into their interests and behaviors through IoT digital devices. This is a demonstration of companies becoming more intelligent.
Whilst IoT is having an impact during everyday life, it is now having an effect on how hotels are delivering hospitality. The hospitality industry is benefiting from IoT in many ways to improve the service it provides to guests. The hotel business has an unprecedented opportunity to improve and grow. IoT hospitality has now become an essential driver to the service hotels provide and helps mitigate service problems to better improve customer experience. For example, a customer may have issues checking-in to a room, have issues with entering a room or may have a concern with a room rate such as no breakfast as part of the rate. How would IoT and hospitality technologies assist? `
photo/ Michael Jarmoluk via pixabay.com
IoT and hospitality can now use smart access control systems with magnetic ‘swipe’ cards to determine the room number the customer needs access to with a magnetic reader. Hotel agents now have it easy to resolve issues with room rates by simply accessing online reservation data to apply additions to the rate. Whilst these are some examples of forwarding-thinking IoT within hospitality, there needs to be an understanding of how IoT technologies have developed improvements to the valued service the hospitality industry delivers.
- Improvements to Room Occupancy – Due to increased automation and data sharing, hospitality hotels are benefitting from cost-saving measures. With IoT and hospitality, hotels are more in control to deliver a better quality of service in hotel rooms. For example, adjusting the lighting of the room, detecting and adjusting the temperature of the room which decreases energy costs, and predictive maintenance abilities, where technology can predict issues with equipment and proactively resolve them before it becomes a major problem. The use of smart IoT technologies helps provide a more comfortable service.
- Electronic Key Card Access – Long gone are days where you open room doors with a set of keys. IoT is able to send digital signals to create key cards to a mobile phone. The phone than can be used to communicate with the door to lock and unlock. As mentioned above, some hotels continue to use magnetic stripe cards to use data to provide access to the room the customer needs.
- Personalized Rooms and Controls – IoT and hospitality are beginning to use something known as hyper-personalization. The likes of Hilton and Marriott are now using IoT technology to allow users to control certain features of the room through their mobile phones. This helps guests adjust the temperature of the AC, television control and control lighting. This is a technique that helps to connect users personally to the room, using data analysis, collection and automation to create marketing data for the guests. This helps connect closer to the guest to understand their hotel stay trends.
IoT technology is becoming more beneficial in helping guests become more personalized and personally connected to their hotel room. Hotels also benefit from energy-saving, resources, and costs. IoT holds the key to improving business process, delivering an enhanced customer experience and optimize business growth and establishment in the hospitality industry.
Author: Sheikh Huzaifa
