In 2021, the hotel industry has to deal with raised concerns about safety and personalization from travelers.
As Deloitte observed, people choose to stay in a hotel this year because they feel more secure there (89% of respondents) and prefer the amplified sense of control over exposure and their own safety (86% of respondents).
In the given circumstances, industry players are in constant search for cutting-edge technologies that will provide the desired level of control and safety for their visitors.
In this regard, smart rooms are the tools that meet these needs and serve a variety of other purposes, including improving guest experience to increase revenue.
However, many businesses hesitate to implement them due to a lack of knowledge regarding their use cases and challenges. In today’s post, we’ll go over the best smart room technologies and reveal their substantial benefits to let you create a smart room blueprint for your own solution.
What Is Smart Room and How Does Everything Work?
Thanks to IoT devices, a smart room appears as an app that helps guests find, book, pay, and control their hotel stay on site on their smartphones or through a single smart hub.
The popularity and number of features inside smart room solutions are growing, making the app or the smart hub more and more accurately designed to make booking a hotel room easy, secure, and more enjoyable, both for guests and owners.
The range of applications of smart rooms is tremendous and goes beyond the ability to search for available hotels in your city or use the wireless connection and USB charges as in-room technology in hotels.
The solution establishes the basis for a hyperpersonalized experience for guests, meaning that each action, device, and facility can be adjusted to their needs at the comfort of owners.
For example, smart room technology can let the guest choose the preferred temperature and entertainment without the need to switch between separate devices. Also, travelers and housekeepers can interact with anti-virus robots that bring them morning coffee and newspapers, along with numerous other use cases.
10 Smart Room Technologies Your Hotel Can Implement Today
Smart room technology is still novel yet effective, which means a promising business advantage for hotels that adopt it before others. But nobody wants to invest in non-working solutions. For your convenience, we’ve gathered the most cost-effective tactics and tools hotels can apply today in this section.
1. Personalized Room Controls
In this case, IoT-enabled key devices (like lighting, heating, air conditioning systems, blinds, or draperies) will be connected to the hotel’s systems through a central controller, be that a smart hub, speaker, smartphone, or tablet. This way, the smart room lets guests manage multiple devices on their phones. In their turn, owners can get more control over the resources they spend.
2. Voice Control for Entertainment
There are various ways to apply voice recognition in smart hotel rooms, starting from managing TV to navigating through pay-to-view entertainment on several devices. In this regard, Amazon Echo and Alexa are the most popular devices with this function in hotels to date.
3. Smart Hubs
With smart room technology, guests and owners can improve room service collaboratively. In particular, smart hubs can let your guests order breakfast in bed, book an appointment with an on-site masseuse, and even arrange for a post-workout shower.
4. Interactive Hotel Maps
A wall map in a hotel can be enriched with augmented reality to provide more interesting and interactive experiences to clients. Depending on the level of sophistication, this smart room technology can help your guests find their way around and even tell you when their favorite restaurants are open.
5. UVC Lighting Control for Disinfecting
Smart rooms in hospitals are highly effective at killing viruses with UVC technology that is safe for humans. Among the in-hotel applications of this smart room technology for healthcare, you can sanitize packages and room keys, thus helping your guests feel safer in your hotel.
6. Branded Mobile Apps for Hotels
Letting guests control their hotel experience in an app is one of the best practices for smart rooms. When travelers can find, book, control, and review their stay in one place, you get the source of valuable information to improve your services and apply for marketing activities.
7. Hotel Robots
You can teach robots to bring towels or tea to the smart room, freeing your maids to do other work and increasing their safety thanks to social distance maintenance. Even more, hotel robots can assist people in more sophisticated tasks, like fixing technical errors, noticing poor connectivity, and notifying housekeepers about food shortages.
8. Digital Concierges
This smart room technology is an excellent way to save time on the back end without limiting the guest experience. In hotels, virtual robots and chatbots can handle the most basic inquiries, including answering typical questions about facilities or today’s restaurant menu.
They allow housekeepers to take care of the big things. Also, digital concierges are a great way to help reduce contact with guests without humans having to be there at all.
9. Contactless Tracing
The enhanced safety level of smart meeting rooms includes contactless tracing, meaning an ability to handle safe meetings and events in hotels. Such devices track movements and alert about social distancing problems, improving safety measures for crowd control on site.
10. Contactless Payment
For extra safety, it’s essential to provide your guests with the ability to pay for services without using a touchpoint. In this regard, supporting mobile wallets and providing an option to book a stay in an app are the must-have smart room technologies for hotels these days.
Top 5 Benefits of Smart Room for Owners and Guests
The idea of smart hotels is slowly catching up to and bringing forth all kinds of benefits for owners and guests. Generally, the smart room system introduces the required level of safety and personal control for contemporary travelers. Here’s the list of its top benefits.
1. Higher Security
Smart rooms are equipped with webcams, microphones, speakers, and an intercom system so that owners can see who is at their door without having to open it.
In their turn, guests can easily access their room after entering their personal pin code, without worrying about losing or stealing a key card. Some extra post-COVID safety measures include touchless technologies, maid service delivered by robots, and crowd control.
2. Better Customer Experience
The hotel experience becomes more enjoyable for the guest thanks to an opportunity to create ideal surroundings in one device and before the stay. The result is a more memorable visit with a ‘Wow’-effect and total comfort.
3. Sustainability
Smart rooms address today's customers’ demand for eco-friendly facilities and services. IoT lighting systems and thermostats provide the next-level optimization of spending resources, bringing sustainability and cost-effectiveness to hotels.
4. Greater Personalization
With smart rooms, you can create a recreational experience that feels like home, thanks to the numerous tools that guests can adjust in a hotel and remotely in advance.
5. Quick Fixes
When something goes wrong in a hotel, full control via IoT devices makes it much easier for owners to detect problems timely and provide accurate technical assistance when needed.
Ask Intellectsoft for Help!
Although it might seem like a new idea, smart rooms are actually becoming increasingly popular around the world, thanks to the large amount of convenience and safety they provide for guests and owners.
And to make the most of hotel room technology, Intellectsoft experts recommend combining it with your existing mobile apps and hotel property management software so that everything works correctly and lets you enjoy all the business benefits of the solution.
If you need assistance with smooth smart room integration, we can help! Intellectsoft has years of experience creating innovative solutions for the hospitality industry. We are ready to apply our knowledge and skills to your business challenge.
In addition to smart hotel rooms, here is the set of extra capabilities you can get with our custom software development for travel and hospitality services:
- Legacy system transformation. We support hospitality modernization in a never-ending journey to streamline its workflow, increase the bottom line, and start creating innovative ways to serve guests.
- Mobile app development. With our help, you can streamline the way you provide amenities for customers and offer everything they need for their stay on a single app.
- Loyalty and reward system development. Build emotional commitments in your customers using our innovative loyalty program.
- Microservers and third-party integration. We help hotels streamline their digital presence by re-engineering their websites in a way that's easier to maintain.
- Big Data services. With Big Data, you can track your guests' journeys across your entire hotel – from your marketing efforts to their experiences with your staff and your property – all in real-time.
- Custom software integration. Our software integration with third-party systems for residential and commercial properties allows us to deliver effective solutions so you can use what you already have to maximize your ROI.
- Custom software development solutions. Set up a software solution that's right for you to respond faster to your guests’ needs.
Contact us to hire a skilled and experienced developer team. Let's work together and find innovative solutions relevant to you to help improve your business and achieve your goals!
