A Blog by INTELITY

At Your Service

The latest innovation and trends in contactless guest experience and the products that are revolutionizing the service industry.

INTELITY

Stay and Play: Driving Casino Guest Revenue Using Hotel Tablets and Apps

Smart room technology, such as hotel tablets and mobile apps, help increase the guest experience while keeping guest dollars on-site.

We’ve all heard the old casino saying, “Put your money where your mouth is.” But what if you could put more of your guests’ money back into your property? Smart room technology, such as hotel tablets and branded mobile apps, allow casino owners to do just this, while improving the guest room experience, streamlining back-of-house operations, and ensuring you’re keeping guests’ dollars at your property.

Dining at Guests’ Fingertips

After a long day at the roulette table, a guest looking for a meal doesn’t have to look farther than the comfort of their own hotel room. By using an in-room smart tablet, guests can view the most up-to-date menus and place in-room dining orders with just a tap on their hotel tablets — keeping their dining dollars at your property. This smart room technology also helps streamline back-of-house operations, eliminating time-consuming room service phone calls and allowing employees to update the menu in real-time when an item is no longer available.

Market to Guests with Ease

Does your property feature entertainment and promotions that change on a regular basis? Keep guests informed and up to date with hotel tablets guest marketing, which can also function as digital compendiums. They can offer access to the property’s amenities and services as well as hotel and casino promotions, retail offerings and more.

Personalized Service with Mobile Apps

Branded mobile apps are another way casino hotels can transform the guest experience, while also streamlining their own operations. Mobile check-in and check-out allow guests to skip the front desk and head straight to their rooms. Keyless entry offered on a mobile app allows customers to access their hotel room without needing a plastic key card.

Once in their room, a branded mobile app lets guests engage with the hotel during — and even after — their stay, providing them with greater convenience and personalization. Similar to in-room hotel tablets, a mobile app offers guests the ability to reserve amenities, access live entertainment schedules, order food and drinks, and request an array of services — from anywhere on the property, including the casino floor. With guest messaging, hotel staff can inform guests of current promotions and serve customized and targeted offers that drive brand loyalty and keep dollars at your property.

Streamline Your Operations

While hotel tablets and mobile apps improve the guest room experience, they also help back-of-house operations run more efficiently. Using a back-office dashboard, employees can manage all staff activity, work orders and delivery times on the property — from the front desk to housekeeping to dining. Branded mobile apps and in-room tablets also cut down on the number of phone calls staff receive while also shortening front desk queues, allowing employees to focus on their tasks without interruption.

For more on how smart room technology can drive revenue at your casino while elevating the guest room experience, request a demo.

How to Drive Hotel Revenue with Smart-Room Tablets

Smart-room tablets are a simple way to drive non-room revenue at your property

As a hotelier, looking for ways to drive non-room revenue is a key focus point of your business. From room service orders to selling hotel-branded merchandise to sharing information about your property’s spa, smart-room tablets are a convenient way to promote on-site purchases and drive dollars once guests arrive on your property. Not to mention, smart-room tablet technology also enhances the guest room experience by easily allowing customers to request additional items, browse the internet and adjust the heating and cooling system — all from an in-room tablet.

In-Room Dining

One of the most common ways to drive additional revenue to a property is through in-room dining. However, long hold times and messy paper room service menus can be deterrents for guests. Smart-room tablets offer guests the ability to browse dining menus that have been refreshed with up-to-the-minute offerings while relaxing in their rooms. Whether they’re looking to order a three-course dinner or just searching for a late-night snack, their next meal is just a tap away — improving the guest room experience while streamlining the employee’s workflow. Tablet technology also provides hotel staff with a simple way to receive dining orders without having their workflow interrupted by room service phone calls.

Hotel Merchandise

It’s hard to find a restaurant, bar or burger stand these days that isn’t also slinging T-shirts and sweatshirts in addition to burgers and beers. In recent years, hotels have jumped on the merch trend by selling their own branded sweatshirts, pool towels, and yoga mats. Many boutique hotels now also sell goods made by local vendors, such as candles, fragrances, and glassware. Instead of making guests wait in line at the busy front desk to purchase a branded souvenir, displaying your hotel’s wares directly on a smart-room tablet is an easy way for them to browse the gift selection while winding down after a long day or waiting for their room service order to arrive. It also cuts down on lines and wait times at the front desk, allowing staff to better service other customers.

Event Spaces and On-Site Offerings

Looking for a way to let guests know about your rental spaces or on-site offerings? An in-room tablet can hold all of the information a front desk pamphlet normally would right on its home screen, making browsing additional hotel information while searching the internet a seamless experience for guests. Tablet technology allows hoteliers to dedicate specific links to rental and event space information along with special pages on available upgrades such as wellness packages and spa offerings — saving a hotel money on the printing costs and allowing information to be as up-to-date as possible.

Tablet technology plays a major role in not only improving the guest room experience, but also seamlessly driving additional revenue to your property. To learn more about how tablet technology can increase revenue at your hotel, request a demo today.

Sustainable Hospitality: How Hotel Tech Helps Your Property Go Green

Deploying in-room tablets and other hotel tech can greatly promote sustainable hospitality

From sustainable clothing to sustainable packaging to sustainable dining, more and more brands are continuing to do their part to protect our planet. And according to recent studies, today’s consumers appreciate it. Last year’s Global Sustainability Study found that 85% of consumers have become “greener” when it comes to their purchasing decisions in recent years. In fact, 63% of respondents said sustainability is an important purchase criterion when it comes to travel and tourism.

In recent years, many of the major airlines have announced plans to switch from traditional fossil-derived jet fuels to ones that are made from renewable sources. Enterprise Rent-A-Car has committed to stocking the newest car models, which are more efficient, including a wide selection of electric and hybrid vehicles. But it’s not just travel transport that can make a difference. Hotels can do their part as well. When it comes to sustainability in hospitality, hotel tech plays a major role. In-room tablets can reduce and even eliminate printed-out hotel marketing materials and room service menus, and mobile apps can eliminate plastic key cards.

Here are just a few ways hotel technology can help your property save the planet and promote sustainable hospitality.

Say Goodbye to Plastic Keys

Hotel mobile apps create an experience of the future for guests and also hold the key to sustainable hospitality. From mobile check-in and check-out to keyless entry, a hotel’s mobile app eliminates the plastic key cards that fill up hotel room garbage cans and, eventually, landfills. Not to mention, mobile apps eliminate the chance of a guest losing their key and needing a replacement or getting locked out altogether.

No More Printing

We all know how easy it is to waste paper, and printing off new marketing materials, announcements and property maps can be a daily necessity. While the information these materials hold is valuable, hotel mobile apps can deliver this information to guests virtually. With an app, guests can access important hotel information, maps and event information right from their pocket. For those who don’t download the app, in-room tablets can communicate must-know information and keep travelers up-to-date, while also promoting sustainable hospitality.

A New Way to Dine

The pandemic heavily changed the way we view menus at restaurants. QR codes handed to diners or taped to tables is now a regular occurrence across the country. And the same can be said for sustainability in hospitality. Uploading a room service menu to your hotel mobile app is an easy way for guests to access your most up-to-date offerings no matter where they are on the property and reduce your use of paper and ink. In-room tablets featuring room service menus offer the same seamless ordering experience, plus they allow staff to easily keep menus updated up-to-the-minute in case something sells out.

Sustainability in hospitality, like all other industries, is important to not only our planet, but the vast majority of today’s travelers. To learn more about how hotel tech can help your property go green, request a demo today.

Overcoming Travel Pitfalls Using Hotel Tech

Utilizing hotel tech at your property can mitigate common travel pitfalls and recover the guest experience

From delayed flights and lost luggage to forgotten items and COVID restrictions, even if a traveler is on vacation, the travel process can be a stressful one. According to a recent study conducted by tour operator Trafalgar, approximately 89% of survey respondents said they find traveling to be a stressful event. As a hotelier, it’s your goal to allow guests to de-stress, enjoy themselves, and make memories that will last them a lifetime — whether they are on vacation, a business trip or attending an event at your hotel. One simple way to do this is by integrating hotel tech, such as a mobile app or in-room tablet, into your property.

Here are a few ways hotel tech can mitigate common travel pitfalls and ensure a stress-free experience for your guests.

Eliminate the Front Desk Wait

After a long day of waiting in lines at the airport, the baggage claim, and for a rideshare, the last thing a weary traveler wants to do is wait in a queue to check-in at the hotel. Hotel tech, such as a mobile app, allows guests to digitally check-in and use their smartphones for keyless entry, completely bypassing the front desk and allowing them to go straight to their rooms. Once they are ready to depart, the digital check-out process is just as easy.

Replace Can’t-Live-Without Items

Once in their rooms, guests staying at hotels outfitted with in-room tablets can request any items they may have forgotten, just with a few simple taps on a screen. Guests no longer need to trek down to the front desk in their pajamas after realizing they’ve forgotten their toothpaste. A quick tap on the in-room tablet or on their mobile app replenishes any needed items, including extra towels or pillows.

Dining — On Demand

Hotels that feature in-room tablets allow travelers to browse digital dining menus and order food and drinks to their room without having to pick up a phone and wait for the room service operator. For hotels that don’t have an on-property restaurant, in-room tablet technology provides guests with the ability to use delivery services such as Door Dash or Uber Eats without having to pick up their personal cell phone and re-enter their new location details. Hotels with a mobile app allow busy guests to order food on their time from anywhere on the property and get it delivered directly to their room.

Create a Digital Concierge Experience

A mobile app can offer guests a digital concierge experience — guiding them through the local attractions, dining options, and off-site events right on their mobile phones, whether they are in their rooms, by the pool, or at the bar. For hotels that don’t have a traditional concierge desk, an in-room tablet can offer up the same trusted recommendations right from the guest’s room.

Hotel tech can help streamline the travel experience and allow guests to have a stress-free stay, no matter if they are visiting on business or for pleasure. To learn more about how hotel tech can mitigate the stress of travel, request a demo today.

Demonstrating where in-room tablets can improve service

What is one singular action that your hotel can take in Q4 2022 and early 2023 to lay a solid foundation for future revenue growth and evolving guest demands?

Hotel operations have never had a silver bullet in this sense, but the long-term trend is that of automation and more tech-driven guest touchpoints to free up teams to execute more complex tasks elsewhere.

As it’s now time to start thinking about the ‘post-post-pandemic’, let’s focus this discussion of automation, and the broader goal of improving guest service, around the in-room tablet and what it can do to boost operations. Key to this to is think in terms of optimizing total revenue per guest (TRevPAR) while sustaining current net operating incomes – that is, topline growth with marginal cost. For this, technologies like in-room tablets help by giving guests a convenient way to browse through then purchase additional services at a static or low-commission SaaS fee.

Why In-Room Tablets Are Now Critical

The smart-room tablets offered by leading hotel industry vendors show how the near-term pain of installation and staff retraining are far offset by incremental revenues, increased labor productivity and the flexibility to accommodate future service enhancements.

To elaborate on this, smart-room tablets come with the following key advantages:

  1. Offering a convenient and intuitive user interface for guests to learn about the property, explore the local area and order room service or reserve additional services like spa appointments
  2. Providing a content-as-a-service (CaaS) channel for personalized promotions and additional TRevPAR as well as third-party advertising revenue sharing
  3. Addressing basic guest inquiries and automating service orders to reduce the workload that these incur on front desk associates, freeing up their time for other tasks
  4. Newer tablets use materials and production methods that increase their durability against drops and corrosion from cleaning or sanitization applications
  5. Getting more granular data on guest demands to feed into business intelligence software and make highly informed decisions to guide future initiatives
  6. Acting as the control hub for the totality of IoT-enabled ‘connected room’ features including, but not limited it, thermostats, lighting, alarm clocks, blinds, TVs and smart speakers

Before we get too far into the alphabet soup of all the applicable technology acronyms, what’s most critical here is that your company seek out automation tools as a means of liberating your team from the interruptive ‘busywork’ that can stress them out and prevent them from rolling out new projects that are necessary for product evolution.

Right now, amidst the peak of peak seasons afforded to us by the current travel recovery, the goal of reducing busywork can be hard to devote time towards. And yet it is essential to get underway right now with a firm process for automation deployment so that you don’t try to change too fast and experience service delivery hiccups as a result.

A Southern California Example

To help show what in-room tablets can offer, we touched base with Tyrone Flowers, the Assistant General Manager at H20 Hermosa Beach which recruited INTELITY as its tablet solution vendor.

Nestled in this beachside community within the greater Los Angeles area, H20 Hermosa Beach excels offering a relaxed, boutique luxury experience typical for Southern California and expedited the tablet solution installation by recruiting an external IT team to handle the setup amidst ongoing high occupancies straining the onsite team.

“As may be apparent already, we were looking for a smart-room tablet solution that would help introduce guests to the area and alleviate our command center, the front desk,” commented Flowers. “Being walking distance from the beach, we get a lot of families and sporting tournament guests, translating into lots of different needs and questions from this healthy blend of corporate and leisure. The tablets have helped us to quickly answer some of these inquiries and relay service requests so that we can maintain our local market leadership.”

While the most popular usages for in-room tablets vary by brand and territory, Flowers remarked that the guests at H20 were particularly keen on using these devices for completing minibar purchases as well as the occasional housekeeping request to help round out a great onsite experience.

Overall, Flowers highlights that the tablet solution at H20 will nonetheless require some finessing as guest behaviors change. Like practically any other initiative, it is a work in progress and that needs reevaluation and tweaking.

Once installed, though, it is easier to execute future upgrades because the hotel team has more bandwidth to focus on the rapid turnaround of these updates. Again, it all comes down to time and enabling your team for both near-term and long-term success. Our hope is that, from this example and the bullet points above, you consider what smart-room tablets can do for your hotel brand.

How to Make the Guest Experience All-Inclusive

A recent Wyndham study reported 77% of all travelers currently prefer all-inclusive, seamless travel. Here are a few ways to make your guests’ stay feel all-inclusive — even if you aren’t an all-inclusive resort.

After more than two years of turbulent travel plans, canceled flights and, ultimately, canceled vacations, traveler frustration seems evident due to the recent increase of consumers gravitating towards all-inclusive travel options. A survey conducted in early 2022 by Wyndham found that 75% of travelers said they believed booking an all-inclusive vacation is the best way to travel, while 77% said they found it to be less stressful. As hoteliers, creating a stress-free environment for guests is priority number one. Guest experience tech ensures a seamless stay for travelers and provides them with everything they need with just a push of a button — or tap of a smart device.

Here are a few ways guest experience tech can help you create an all-inclusive, hassle-free experience for your guests, even if your property is not an all-inclusive resort.

Seamless Check-In & Check-Out

Nothing says luxury quite like rolling up to your hotel room after a long day of travel without having to wait in an endless line in the lobby. Safe and secure, mobile check-in allows guests to check into the hotel from anywhere, access their room with mobile key, and even share keys with fellow room occupants. When it comes to the check-out process, it is easier than ever with a simple tap of a button.

Entertainment On Demand

Guests accustomed to streaming television at home can seamlessly do so by simply casting content to the in-room smart TV. A vacation or business trip doesn’t have to stop their binge schedule as they can now bring their favorite series, movies, and music along with them.

Putting Guests First

In-room tablets put the guest at the center of the experience universe. From allowing them to easily order contactless room service at their leisure to effortlessly request extra items such as towels or toiletries, in-room tablets let guests take control of their experience on their own time, which, honestly, is the ultimate luxury.

Additionally, in-room tablets and hotel mobile apps serve as a digital concierge for your property, enabling guests to view a menu of hotel amenities and activities. Guests can explore hotel recommendations for nearby venues and events, as well as book reservations and make special requests, all from a mobile device. In-app marketing and promotions, in addition to marketing services and amenities to guests’ pre-arrival, inform travelers of all the options available to them and enable them to create their ideal itinerary for an all-inclusive, seamless experience.

Personalized Messages for Your Guests

Many guests who travel to an all-inclusive resort, select this type of vacation because they enjoy the experience of being waited on. Hotels can simulate this level of service through text messages with their guests. After a guest checks in and settles into their room, hotels can send them a text message and ask a few questions to gauge their immediate needs and preferences. Some sample questions could include:

  • Is your room the way you like it?
  • Do you need reservations for breakfast, lunch or dinner?
  • Would you like the concierge to recommend activities or outings?

Including a link in the message for the guest to download your hotel mobile app, if they haven’t already, and peruse the menu of services, amenities, and activities available to book, also puts the guest in control of creating their ideal itinerary and a seamless stay.

Even if your property is not an all-inclusive resort, guest experience tech can help facilitate an amenities-rich digital concierge experience for your guests. Want to learn more about guest experience tech? Request a demo today.