Hilton and Marriott Turn to the Internet of Things to Transform the Hotel Room Experience
Source: Skift | Deanna Ting
When Hilton CEO Christopher Nassetta took to the stage at the Skift Global Forum in September, one of the most headline-grabbing statements he made had to do with what he described as Hilton’s “Connected Room.”
“Imagine a world where the room knows you, and you know your room,” Nassetta said. “Imagine a world where you walk in, the TV says, ‘How are you doing, John? Nice to see you,’ and all of your stuff is preloaded and not only preloaded, but the only thing you ever need to touch to control in the room is in the palm of your hand,” he said, referring to a guest’s smartphone.
Hilton is currently beta testing this concept in a handful of hotels, and the company intends to expand this feature to more hotels worldwide in 2018.
But Hilton isn’t the only hotel company that wants to deliver smart, hyper-personalized hotel rooms. In fact, not far from Hilton’s Innovation Lab in McLean, Virginia, another major hotel company has similarly grand designs of using the Internet of Things (IoT) to transform the hotel guest experience. And last week, Skift got a firsthand sneak peek of this new guest room experience.
At Marriott’s own Innovation Lab, housed in the lower levels of its main headquarters office in Bethesda, Maryland, Marriott senior vice president of global design strategies Karim Khalifa and his team have also been working on their own version of a connected room.
“With this room type, we’re experimenting with technology that not only anticipates your needs, but also personalizes the experience for you,” Khalifa said.
Called the IoT Guestroom Lab, the Marriott facility consists of two different model guest rooms. One is meant to showcase what this technology might look like for a completely newbuild hotel, with all the bells and whistles of what’s currently possible with IoT technology. The other shows both owners and consumers what that experience could be like in already existing hotel rooms, with minimal construction or infrastructure changes.
Marriott just began showing the rooms to owners and consumer focus groups last week, and after some feedback, Khalifa and his team will then begin to decide if and how to initiate a formal pilot in different Marriott hotels.
Both Marriott and Hilton share, more or less, the same vision of delivering a hospitality experience that’s more personalized and smarter about anticipating guests’ needs during their stay. But how they respectively plan to achieve this goal involves two different paths.
TRANSITIONING FROM SMART HOME TO SMART HOTEL
As more consumers bring artificial-intelligence powered voice assistants like Google Home and Amazon Echo into their homes, more households are becoming “smart homes.” And while the number of people living in smart homes today is still relatively low — just more than 15 million, or 12.5 percent of U.S. households were considered to be in smart homes by the end of 2016 — that number is expected to increase to 28 percent by 2021, according to media research group Kagan.
“The Internet of Things has opened up home automation to the everyday consumer,” said Ken Freeman, senior vice president of demand generation at Legrand, an electrical and data communications product manufacturer. “Anyone can buy an intelligent thermostat, color-changing lamp, or smart door lock. As a result, consumers are starting to demand at least the same level of technology in the hotel guest room.
“Hoteliers have to identify the right level of technology for their properties and they need to implement these, even if only at a basic ability to remotely control lighting and temperature, or the consumer is going to judge them as antiquated and irrelevant. The hoteliers that get this right will gain the loyalty of the next-generation traveler.”
But translating the smart home experience into the hospitality world, and getting it right, presents a variety of challenges related to cost, infrastructure, and security, among many others. Currently, there are technologies such as sensor-activated thermostats, digital room keys, and in-room streaming/casting services, but most brands have yet to connect them through a comprehensive system or platform powered by IoT.
Last year, Skift spoke to Scott Hansen, Marriott International director of guest technology, who told us: “The future of the guest room will be voice activation. Amazon Echo and Apple’s Siri are consumer versions of this technology. I have all that in my own home. That is the future. Whether we use that existing tech or some other voice-activated mechanism has yet to be determined. The real brick in the road is trying to get the Internet of Things upgraded to the net-connected appropriate part of the network. It’s very expensive to retrofit everything in a hotel.”
One year later, those strategies for bringing the smart home into the hotel room are beginning to become much more apparent. For now, the extent of the smart home technology being brought into the hotel room consists of an Amazon Echo in every room, as is the case with Wynn Resorts, for example. Other brands, Marriott and Best Westernincluded, have also piloted the placement of these voice assistants in hotel rooms.
Robert Cole, the founder of RockCheetah, a hotel marketing strategy and travel technology consulting firm, said that as more hotel companies begin to explore IoT-connected rooms in varying degrees of depth, they’ll “need to work on replicating the experiences that these travelers have in their homes, already in their everyday lives. How can they make that a seamless transition when they travel? And do all the same things? That will be challenging.”
Another challenge is the ability to deal with a variety of devices. The way that many of today’s IoT systems are set up involves ecosystems of single brands: all Apple, all Google, all Amazon, for example.
“Think about a hotel room,” said James Stansberry, senior vice president and general manager of ARTIK IoT for Samsung Electronics. “There are dozens of different products in there from many different manufacturers — curtain shades, thermostats, TVs, light switches, etc. How do you connect all of those devices together easily and be able to trigger an action easily?”
As Marriott and Hilton are finding out, there are different ways to make a hotel room “smart” and all the more personalized for guests. Here’s a closer look at what they’re up to.