The pandemic continues to issue a unique challenge to hotels: provide a safe, relaxing guest experience, by creating as few touch points as possible. Hotels, however, have responded in kind. By investing in touchless solutions alongside well-tech such as dynamic lighting and shading, hoteliers are building greater value for their offerings by creating a flowing, contactless guest experience.
Guests don’t even have to pick up the remote in their room to turn on the TV. They can have complete control over the room from everything to dimming the lights, setting the thermostat to their desired temperature, shading control and—if the technology budget allows—scheduling these routines either through their phone, or, in some cases, voice. And to achieve this, it helps to have an open API so one third party can talk to another third party.
It’s all about making the guest experience personal. “Ideally we want our environments to be aware of us and our intentions and everything else that goes with it,” says Yiannis Cabolis, director of technology innovation at Electrosonic.
Proper Control Depends on a Proper Set-Up
Before any control can begin, the most important step is making sure the right infrastructure is in place to deploy it. “You can have the best technology in the world but if you have no platform or no infrastructure to deploy it, you’re dead in the water,” says Cabolis.
One of the keys to project success is when the team is compiled of someone from the customer side and the IT department.
“You want to include IT right from the get-go because they know their networks. They know if their switches need to be replaced before this can even happen or they don’t want us on their network at all and we have to build our own network,” says Joseph Yost, director of engineering services for CCS Global. “You don’t want to get to the end of the road and then request a bunch of IPs from an IT director and the IT director says, what are you doing?” Engage them early and keep them involved in the project from the start,” he says.
Technology is Always Changing, and so Should the Experience
Other key successes for integrators include having patience, compassion and flexibility. “Technology is forever changing, budgets are forever changing, and the guests’ needs are forever changing; so, whatever is designed has to be extremely flexible for the client,” says Chris Kratochwill, manager of design consulting at Electrosonic.
“I think that really listening carefully and understanding and providing not future-proof [tech] because technology is always evolving but specifying what is that can last in time,” says Maurizzo Capuzzo, chief marketing officer at Electronsonic. “That’s why in our vision and mission, we talk about lasting experiences not only from the memorability point of view, but that you have a technology infrastructure that you don’t have to toss away because technology is continually changing.”
Another version of this article originally appeared on our sister site Commercial Integrator.
