IoT, AI & Mobile App: How This Tech Reshaping Hotel Industry?

One of the biggest beneficiaries of the mobile app revolution has been the hotel and hospitality industry. While the travel industry always focuses on making travelers well informed of making their travel experience better, the hospitality sector focuses on comfort and personalized experience. Thanks to mobile apps and a host of connected devices and technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI), maintaining such focuses has become easier than ever before. Fortunately, the hotel and hospitality industry has adopted these new technologies and digital means to offer the most sophisticated guest and traveler experience.

How are these new technologies making the hospitality and travel industry smarter? How are these technologies reshaping the hotel and hospitality industry? Let us explain some prominent ways this transformation of the industry is taking place.

Automated Check-In 

For gliding through the waves of competition, travel businesses and hotels can no longer undermine the importance of automation in fulfilling customer needs and making bookings happen quickly. Automated or self-check-in systems through mobile apps are the most convenient way to help customers book accommodation and check-in the hotel room with minimum dependence on manual services. 

Smart Travel Assistants 

Chatbot support and smart assistant support have already been popular across numerous industries. These digital assistants and bot apps easily help customers to access any information, guidance and take relevant actions such as booking, etc. The smart travel assistants can make life simpler for travelers as they can just get numerous things done with simple voice commands. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is further creating scopes for more value addition for these smart travel assistants. 

Smart travel assistants come with advanced capabilities to perform many tasks on the requests of the travelers. Moreover, they can notify users about certain changes in the flight schedule, and the latest news about the destination, flight or train cancellations, weather reports, and numerous other things. Most importantly, these smart assistants also help the hoteliers and the hospitality industry to provide customer support continuously. 

Personalized Accommodations Booked Through Mobile Apps 

Most hoteliers always insist on creating value propositions that make the customers come back to the hotel time and again as and when they visit the place. But a run of the mill offerings that are common across all hotels does not necessarily attract quality and high-value customers. Personalized stay experience is often the key for most people to come back to a hotel as customers. This is where smart mobile apps can help. 

Mobile app developers are now building smart mobile booking apps for the hoteliers to allow their customers to choose certain preferences such as south-facing balconies, home theatre, and access to the swimming pool, choices of upholstery and room decor, etc. Based on these detailed preferences, the app can suggest suitable accommodations along with a price quote.

Smart Hotel Keys

Maintaining optimum security for the guests while minimizing difficulties for them is the consistent focus area for any ambitious hotelier. Naturally, they lean toward smarter and leaner ways to take care of certain things like the hotel keys. The rows of hanging keys at the reception desk are the common specter across most hotel receptions. Well, this is something going to change and make way for smart digital keys shortly. Already many hotels have adopted this new alternative to manual keys and made maintenance and customer access to their rooms easier. The smart digital keys, besides making things easier for the management, also ensure secure and zero-hassle entry and exit of the hotel guests. 

Saving and Managing Energy Better 

As competition in the hotel and tourism sector is forcing the businesses to embrace cost-cutting measures of all kinds, minimizing misuse and wastage of energy has become the focus of many industries. For saving energy through a data-driven and automated way, systems like smart thermostats are already being used. Thermostats and energy sensors can monitor the occupancy rates and control electrical devices and equipment across hotel rooms. They can also control the load of electricity based upon weather patterns. 

Predictive Hotel Management and Maintenance

Thanks to AI and machine learning technologies now hoteliers can easily monitor, track, and optimize the consumption of energy and, at the same time, can detect hazards and harmful trends. This helps hoteliers to reduce wastage of resources, materials, energy, and human capital while they can help to organize the resources to make management more productive and result-driven. Such smarter solutions also help to predict system failures while keeping the maintenance cost lower. 

A hotel needs to deal with faulty systems at different levels, and many of them ultimately contribute to the spike in maintenance costs. From the leaky toilets to the cracks in backyard walls to the leakage in a reservoir to the underperforming kitchen chimney to the lack of maintenance in some less occupied rooms, smart monitoring systems can continuously give alerts on many issues and help the management to take productive steps.

Dynamic Pricing Advantage 

Already dynamic pricing is used by many hoteliers and travel businesses to stay competitive. Since the right pricing is crucial to avoid charging customers excessively and make an adequate margin, pricing based on the occupancy rate, booking, and market demand is essential. Smart AI-based solutions keeping a close watch on market dynamics, demand, and occupancy rate can determine pricing that doesn’t allow overpricing or underpricing. 

Conclusion 

These smart technologies and digital means benefited travelers and customers most in terms of quality and value for money. On the other hand, these technologies helped businesses to grab more business opportunities than ever before. A truly win-win situation for both sides has been created by these smart means.