IoT Ensures Profit to the Hospitality Industry

The core intention of the hospitality industry is to make a guest experience the warmth of home when they are staying in the hotel. The idea and intention of creating a ‘home away from home’ require detailed understanding of the guest’s behavior triggered or motivated by unfulfilled and fulfilled requirements respectively. 

Such understating could only be achieved by the hoteliers through insightful data about the guest. Hence, there was a time when Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems were adopted by the hoteliers. Due to the limited capabilities of the SCADA systems, the hoteliers could not collect a sufficient amount of data to design competitive strategies. This is the reason why the Internet of Things (IoT) has come into the picture. IoT assists the hospitality industry to provide ‘Guest Opulence’ without much of a hustle. 

If you are a hotelier then knowing the top 4 advantages of IoT for the hospitality sector will help you to survive in the ruthless marketplace better. 

Easy check-in saves the guest’s time

There was a time when guests had to show up at the front desk in order to collect their room keys. This process took some time that was enough for the tired guests to become annoyed. Soon some solution had to be designed in order to maintain comfort for the guests. 

With the tremendous benefits of IoT, hotels like Hilton and Starwood are empowering their guests through ‘mobile check-ins’. With mobile applications that use Bluetooth wireless communication, locking and unlocking of doors are made easy. With keyless entry, a guest can simply skip the long check-in processes at the front desk. They can now head straight to their rooms and take rest. Hotels like Hilton and Starwood are in fact lowering their labor costs while defining guest satisfaction in an entirely new way by empowering them to bypass the front desk. This puts a good impression on the guests about the hotels as the guests feel that their time has been valued well by the hotels.

Hyper personalization of rooms makes a guest feel right at home

With the intention to make the guests feel ‘special’, hyper-personalization of rooms is the new approach in which the hoteliers are investing into. Once the guests will enter into the room through the mobile check-ins, s/he will find the room temperature very comforting (just as they preferred in their last stay). The lights will turn on automatically and the curtains will open on their own. The television too will turn on automatically and the guest’s name will flash across the screen as a gesture of welcome. If there was any drink which the guests had ordered during their past stay/s, it will be there in the customized menu present in the room. All these will make the guests feel as if the room knows them and the room knows them back. This sense of belongingness is adds on to the 

Voice-bots make the guest’s stay easy 
Every guest wants to be listened to as that makes a guest feel ‘special & important’. With Amazon’s Alexa, the hoteliers can make the guests feel ‘like a king’. This voice-bot empowers a guest to design her/his own comfort inside the hotel room. How? Well, whatever the guest requires, s/he can simply voice it. If the guest is in the mood to rest, then the guest just requires ordering the voice bots to draw the curtains. The requirement of room services and dimming the lights according to the mood can all be voiced! Tuning to the favorite music and television series by simply mentioning their title are the trending possibilities in the hospitality sector with the IoT strategies. 

Preventive maintenance strengthens the brand image  
Technical and non-technical failures can leave a bad impression on the guests. Exotic hotel locations, delectable food and polite staff behavior can lose their excellence due to such glitches. With IoT driven preventive maintenance, any possibility of fatal mishaps or the narrow scope of the slightest of guest inconvenience gets mitigated. 

The IoT sensors make sure that the sprinkler systems have the potential to work on time. Whether the hotel lifts are working properly or not, the smoke and carbon monoxide detectors have functioning batteries or not are all taken care of. If any abnormality gets detected, the hotel staff is informed immediately. With smart sensors, any unfavorable change in the machine status comes under the broad daylight before it gets worse. 

If an air conditioner is going to run out of its operational capabilities, the hotel staff will get to know about it beforehand only. Such situations will save the hoteliers from last-minute shuffles of the guest’s rooms. 

On a concluding note:
The wave of change has uplifted the world of technology to stupendous heights. The Internet of Things (IoT) is a state-of-the-art technology which has uplifted industries across the globe. The hospitality industry is no exception. The basic motivation of the hospitality industry is to make a guest feel ‘special & empowered’ through unforgettable services. 

With IoT strategies, understanding the choice and preference of each and every guest becomes easy. The IoT sensors collect data about the guest’s likings from the hotel rooms and hotel buildings. Next, the data is sent to cloud. Hoteliers derive data from cloud for designing competitive strategies to stay ahead in the market. 

Making the guests feel at ‘home away from home’ is the biggest achievement of the hospitality sector. In order to design a warm and friendly environment for the guests’, hyper-personalization of rooms, mobile check-ins, preventive measures and more were introduced in the recent past. There is no turning back for the hospitality sector now.