Technology has taken over the world. From modern machinery, and revolutionary software to smart devices that humans are hooked to, all are gifts of technology. The hospitality industry, especially hotels, is also reaping the benefits of automation and technological solutions.
The hospitality industry is all about the customer/guest journey, and hotels are not leaving any stone unturned to deliver the greatest experiences. Hotel automation is one such tool that has been helping them to achieve the same.
Leveraging the power of automation, hotels are increasing operational efficiencies, managing revenue better, and constantly enhancing the guest experience.
In this blog, we will focus on how hotels should use automation to improve guest experiences.
What is hotel automation?
Hotel automation involves the usage of digital systems to streamline operations and replace the manual workforce with a digital one for mundane yet crucial tasks. This allows hotels to bring more efficiency to the tasks, save the leg work, and eliminate room for errors.
Hotel automation optimizes the tasks formerly done by humans, simplifying them and saving hotels, time and resources. HR software in hospitality can further enhance operational efficiency by automating scheduling, payroll processing, and compliance management, allowing staff to focus more on delivering exceptional guest experiences. It is even more important in today’s time due to the talent crunch, staff shortage owing to the pandemic, and changed guest preferences and behaviors.
Automated systems in hotels may help with hotel inventory and channel management, optimizing pricing strategies, tracking and understanding changing market dynamics, and elevating the guest experience.
Ways to automate guest experience
There are plenty of ways in which a hotel can automate its processes. These ways lead to operational efficiencies, revenue, and inventory management, and most importantly, an improved guest experience.
In this section, let’s look at the hotel automation tools that can enhance the guest experience, and allow hotels to achieve greater heights.
Following are the hotel automation tools that ensure a great guest experience:
- Check-in kiosks
Contactless Check-in Hotels are one of the most popular and widely used hotel automation solutions that became more prominent during and post the pandemic. It helps guests skip the long queues and waiting times, and check-in through a digital system, without coming in contact with another human.
Additionally, digital check-in kiosks offer guests an immersive experience. Through this digital system, guests get a smooth, frictionless, and time-saving check-in experience. At the same time, hotels can avoid long queues and the chaos created by them right in the lobby, the first place for guests to enter.
- Digital keys
Digital room key is another hotel automation solution that has been improving the guest experience, since the pandemic.
Digital keys allow the hotel to build upon that seamless digital check-in experience, skipping the front desk hassles altogether. Smart devices such as mobile phones are used as digital keys. Guests need to digitally check-in or use contactless hotel apps, and upon arrival, they can head straight to their rooms and swipe the mobile key for room access.
- Digital menu boards
Hotels with on-site dining and in-room services stand to benefit from automation. Digital restaurant menus allow guests to order quick meals/snacks, from the comfort of their rooms with just a few clicks. These orders directly go to the kitchen or concerned department, allowing them to give more personalized services and eliminating the room for error by intermediaries. Additionally, it allows the restaurant staff to focus more on the seated diners, and their requirements, enhancing the quality of services.
In the case of in-room services, charges on the guest’s bill are automatically tracked, mitigating the hotel’s risk of failing to recoup charges for the services provided.
- Interactive kiosks
Hotels can also install interactive or informational digital kiosks that act like digital concierge for guests. Installed in the hotel lobby, these digital kiosks can offer relevant information to guests such as the weather and local traffic reports, targeted airline arrivals and departures, locate nearby events and attractions, etc.
- Automated request messaging
More automated in-room services enable guests to make housekeeping service requests, book other hotel services such as wellness and spa, and lastly, choose ‘do not disturb’ preferences. The requests made go directly to the concerned department, with no human intervention in the requesting phase, and hence, no room for ambiguity.
Mindful automation
While hotel automation is increasingly being adopted by businesses across the globe, some hoteliers fear that the industry would lose the human and personal touch that some guests seek while traveling and staying at 5 or 7-star properties.
They argue that digital systems disappoint guests who pay big bucks at hotels to experience warm and human-driven hospitality, saving them the efforts of movement and thought. When guests are asked to check themselves in through kiosks or digital keys, for example, they are expected to self-help, which is opposite to the kind of treatment they are looking forward to on a vacation or leisure trip. Technology may make the journey impersonal for such guests.
While this does make sense, hotel automation needs to be adopted mindfully and to the right extent, based on the target audience and guest tastes and preferences. The basic factor that needs to be realized about automation is that it should be used to optimize or simplify human efforts, wherever needed, and not completely replace it in an industry like hospitality.
Hotels need to be mindful while automating their processes. For example, at a luxury hotel, guests may seek the human touch more than they do in a standard 3-star hotel. Similarly, a leisure guest may seek more humanized services than a guest who is staying for work purposes and requires digital systems to save time and effort.
For the former, digital systems should always be assisted with or operated by a hotel staff, who should use technology to know more about guests, and do the timesaving, digital processes for them. After digitally checking them in, they should escort them to their rooms, and discuss about the amenities, attractions, and critical stay details.
This way, the hotel maintained a balance between technology and humans, without the guests realizing that technology-assisted them throughout.
For the later type of guests, automation could be used at full throttle, allowing them to skip long front desk queues, the hassle of using traditional room keys, etc.
Generational differences might also play a role in deciding the use of automation at a property. Baby boomers and Generation X might not be comfortable or accepting automation while millennials and Gen Z might embrace and appreciate it.
So, hotels must know their audience well to decide the extent and overt usage of digital systems at their properties. It should not be the ‘one size fits all’ approach, rather than a customized or personalized approach.
Conclusion
Thus, there are multiple ways a hotel can leverage automation. However, hotels must carefully study their audience, define the property type and size and thereafter, adopt the most suitable technologies and work out appropriate ways to implement them.
Identify and prioritize the most inefficient operations to automate first. A hotel must test the automated procedure/solution before making the changes live.
Since the hospitality industry is predominantly driven by guest experience and personal touch, humans and technology need to work in tandem, and not as replacements.