Voice-activated hotels can provide a new era of customer satisfaction by saving time for guests and staff, giving guests a personalized experience, and becoming a new amenity that your hotel can market. Here, we break down the voice-activated hotel room and what it can do for your guests.
Saving time for your guests
From tablets to smartphones, people are spending more time in front of screens. The vast majority of Americans, 95 percent, now own a cellphone of some kind (Pew) Nearly 75% of Americans own a desktop or laptop, and 42 percent use voice assistants. (Pew). We can communicate with people on the other side of the world, look up the answer to a question in less than 30 seconds and stream entertainment almost flawlessly. While this is amazing as far as convenience goes, it’s leading to growing impatience in our society. We want things instantly.
A voice-activated hotel room is one way to save your guests the time they value so much.
On average, once a guest reaches their hotel room, they spend the first few minutes adjusting the temperature, figuring out the lighting, fiddling with the shower taps, and playing with the TV.
In voice-activated hotel rooms, guests can walk in and set everything just the way they want it right away. They can adjust the temperature and turn on the lights, find out the weather for the day just by speaking. This leaves them with more time to enjoy their stay. Couple that with the convenience of not having to figure out a new world of switches, and you’ve got a happy customer.
Personalization on a whole new level
To truly differentiate a brand, hotels must develop a strong service culture that makes a guest feel special and appreciated, in order for them to come back. With voice-activated hotel rooms, you have a powerful partner in helping them feel more at home in their rooms.
Having Alexas in the room lets hotels personalize the room experience with music, having the ability to request more towels rather than having to call down the front desk.
It’ll make the guests feel more welcome, more comfortable, and more impressed in their rooms. Which means that they’ll feel more like coming back next time they’re in town.
It can drive your hotel above the competition
Like several technologies, voice-activated rooms will probably become the norm way sooner than we may think. But for the now, it’s relatively exclusive — and things that are exclusive have lots of allure. Since they won’t find the feature elsewhere, future guests are going to want to stay in your hotel to experience it. That goes double for the type of guest looking for a luxury stay.
Plus, a good hotel room makes guests feel special and is a huge determinant of whether or not they enjoy their trip. So when they go home and tell everyone about their vacation, they’ll surely tell them about the fantastic hotel they stayed in and how the room was voice-activated. And when it comes to hotel marketing, we all know that a word of mouth review can do more than any digital ad or TV commercial.
