It’s always an exciting moment when you walk into a new hotel room – your first encounter with your temporary new home whether you’re on business, travelling, or just looking for a change of scene. It’s extrinsic and experiential. Get it right and, as a hotel owner or designer, you’ve made a friend for life and forged unforgettable, lifelong memories for the fortunate guest. But, get it wrong, and it’s, well, straight back to the drawing board!
That experience, that feeling, that compact has remained largely unchallenged and unchanged over recent decades. But, in the not too distant future, a tidal wave of change in the way in which we experience and consume hotels is rolling quickly towards us.
The main driver of this change is, of course, technology.
Today, guests may spend hours flicking through photo galleries and comparing amenities such as free Wi-Fi or room service options but, sooner than you might think, hotel rooms will begin to feel more like home regardless. Technological advances are empowering and enabling leading hospitality businesses like the Westcombe Group to bring a truly personal touch to every single room from before the moment you even set foot in the lobby.
Blinds which open and shut at the right times to support the guest’s circadian rhythms and improve quality of sleep, thermostats that intuitively adjust to follow your daily routine, entertainment systems that seamlessly pre-load your favourite shows and playlists. The opportunities are endless. But we’re not talking about some clunky control panel poking out of the wall – the best guest experiences will have alert and responsive technology sitting quietly in the background but ready to spring into life to create enabled rooms that talk to your devices and deliver a precisely personalised and supportive guest experience.
Have you ever tried to enter your hotel room after a long-haul flight only to discover, to your horror, the keycard to your room no longer works because it’s been too close to a phone or been incorrectly coded by reception? Coming and going should be the simplest possible thing for any guest and those of us building future-ready hotels are already taking practical steps to ensure this, first time, every time. Lobby and door security systems which pair to your smartphone mean no more fears about losing key cards or experiencing them fail: if you’re able to tap in and out on public transport and buy your morning coffee all from your phone, why shouldn’t you be able to do the same to get in and out of your hotel room?
Behind the scenes, all those tiny components that come together to create a truly memorable experience are in the process of being streamlined through a dizzying level of digitisation and automation that hotel owners and managements could only dream of a couple of years ago. Do you need extra towels? Do you need to call a taxi? Do you need to alter a dinner reservation? Far too often, doing any of these things currently requires navigating some obscure control panel or picking up an old-fashioned telephone on the bedside table, only to discover the concierge number endlessly engaged.
It’s for these reasons that, across our luxury Acre Hotels collection, we’re doing things completely differently. Your own smart devices are what you use each and every day, so we believe you should equally be able to use them to manage and personalise every aspect of your hotel experience. Bringing total control over your hotel experience via your own smartphone is exactly the kind of critical change that guests want and have a right to expect. These changes will radically change the balance of the relationship between a hotel’s management and its guests, placing real power and complete personalisation into the hands of the guests who are, of course, the hotel’s greatest asset. Those changes are already under way and many more can be expected to arrive over the next decade.
When you leave your room, the modernisation doesn’t stop. For the past few months, I’m happy to share that we’ve been trialling automated robotic cleaning technology at our Ibis Styles London Heathrow hotel, part of our luxury Acre Hotels collection, and the results are already impressive. We’re only at the beginning of the journey, of course. Over coming years, robotics and machine learning will shoulder an increasing share of the duties in cleaning floors, scrubbing bathrooms, replenishing supplies, and delivering room service orders. All these things need to be delivered discreetly, efficiently and on time. This isn’t about replacing staff – it’s about liberating hotel employees so that they can spend more of their time doing what technology cannot, namely, welcoming guests, solving any problems which arise, and creating extraordinary experiences and amazing memories for everyone staying in the hotel.
It’s incumbent on all of us to ensure that technological advances never come at the expense of the guest experience. Hospitality will always remain a people business and being a great inn keeper will continue to require temperament, verve and a brilliant ability to curate wonderful experiences and memories. The winners in 2035 will, therefore, be the hotels that best integrate technology to improve convenience for their guests with subtlety, rather than those that remove the humanity altogether that makes hospitality such a privilege to dispense.