Hard times an infocom wake-up call for hotels?
Can the nation’s hotel chains be dragged into the digital age?
Every time I check in to a hotel that promises free WiFi only to discover it has nothing of the sort — because coverage only extends to the front third of the building or because the network’s capacity can accomodate no more than three users at a time — I’m amazed how many hotels catering to business travelers still believe that the truly essential infotech amenities in the room are the TV and the never-used wireline phone, while Web access is not their concern.
During my last stay at a hotel, I was told that if I couldn’t get WiFi reception in my room, I should try the restaurant, but I was afraid that if I couldn’t get reception there, they’d tell me to go to the kitchen or the alley. And during my last stay at a good hotel, I was annoyed to see the Web access wasn’t free; why not charge me extra for the water in my shower as well?
Hard times may be a wake-up call that helps hotels graduate to more contemporary infocom sensibilities. For example, the decrease in business travel due to recession is already leading an increasing number of them to offer telepresence rooms. In fact, two huge deployments were announced this morning.
AT&T (NYSE: T) has landed a deal to put Cisco telepresence rooms in Marriotts around the world, starting with 25 of its largest markets, such as New York, San Francisco, Washington, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Frankfort and London. The first of them will go live in October.
Also this morning, India-based telecom carrier Tata Communications (NYSE: TCL) announced a deal to install Cisco telepresence rooms in Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, 10 of which will come this year and include Sheraton hotels in New York, Sydney and Toronto as well as the Los Angeles Airport Westin and the W Chicago-City Center. That’s in addition to the 100 or so locations in which Tata is deploying telepresence for its sister company, Taj Hotels.
Another interesting innovation in the hospitality space came last week when NEC Unified Solutions announced it was installing IP phones in the newly opened Wit Hotel in Chicago (owned by DoubleTree) complete with applications from NTT DoCoMo that give guests touch-screen access to services like valet notification, restaurant reservations, ordering wake-up calls, requesting towels, and looking up airline flight or weather information. Wake-up calls can even be made by celebrity sound-alikes (supplied by Chicago’s famous Second City troupe) of Barack Obama, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, Al Capone and the late renowned sportscaster Harray Caray.
As the recession forces more folks to use infocom as a substitute for travel, hotels need to be ready to lure them back when the economy improves by convincing them that hotel infocom has evolved along with them and by making the strong case that infocom and travel complement rather than compete with each other.
June 30th, 2009 at 10:47 am
I neglected to mention above the keyboard that sometimes sits below the television in many hotel rooms, offering Web access through the TV. Has anyone ever actually used that device? Obviously it doesn’t contain the files on my hard drive, so it’s of little use to me, though in the future, maybe, when everything sits in the cloud rather than the desktop, such a system might be useful again.
June 30th, 2009 at 12:20 pm
Excellent piece that hopefully gets the attention of hotel chains across the country. Not having free Wi-Fi in the rooms is a non-starter - the technology for this to work seamlessly has been here almost a decade so there’s reason any business hotel worth its salt can’t offer it.
And I’ve never used the keyboard to access the Internet over the TV - too afraid I’d be charged an arm and leg for service I’m not even sure I’d want to use.
June 30th, 2009 at 12:28 pm
Great observations, Ed. Budget-conscious travelers often train themselves to avoid conveniences in hotels for the same reason they avoid the mini-bar - cost. But upgrading hotel communications has much more to offer in terms of enhancing the guest experience in the interest of building loyalty. Now, in this economy, is the time hotels are starting to seek new AND repeat customers. theWit Hotel is an excellent example of this; their focus on guest experience is visible not only in the brand but in their technology philosophy. Hospitality can be a booming vertical segment in this economy for those technology providers and integrators that can strike a balance between technology sophistication and delivering great value to guests.
June 30th, 2009 at 12:47 pm
I’ve visited several state of the art hotels and consulted with others on creating a usable infrastructure for hotel patrons. No office is as hard to design for wireless as a hotel with long corridors and many tiny rooms all framed in metal studs. Add large conference rooms, lobbies, etc. and the physical structure is challenging.
Complicating the design is capacity. Bring in a large number of guests with their laptops, netbooks, iPhones and other portable wireless devices and you have a lot of traffic. Now we have guests streaming video on the hotel net, requiring “throttling” hardware to limit individual bandwidth. In one case where I consulted, they even had a tech executive hacking their system to see how it was designed!
So a good hotel system is not cheap. It requires an extensive fiber optic backbone, top notch wireless security, sophisticated traffic management and - most importantly - knowledgeable management.
Don’t expect this in a Holiday Inn Express…
Jim Hayes
VDV Works LLC
www.vdvworks.com
June 30th, 2009 at 3:38 pm
An additional area is cruise ships. I just came back from a cruise where the ship charged $.65/min, with about 10 attached computers in a computer room. I would say that most all of the 2200 passengers used that computer room some time during that cruise, for that room was always crowded. However, if they had accessibility in the state rooms, the computer usage from their laptops would be greatly increased. The wiring in a cruise liner is much easier to retrofit than a hotel, for all panels are removable. Their biggest problem then would be the bandwidth. A cruise ship is nothing more than a floating luxury hotel.
June 30th, 2009 at 3:44 pm
Nah, cruise ships are different. That’s not business travel; that’s vacation.
Why were you in the computer room? Why weren’t you stretched out in a chair on the Lido deck reading a book?
I don’t feel sorry for you, JS.
June 30th, 2009 at 5:17 pm
It just seems odd to me that you can get free wireless internet in your room at the “value” hotels like Holiday Inn Express but the upscale establishments, your Marriotts, Hyatts and Hiltons hit you up $10 a day or more. I’ve even seen one hotel where the only way you could get internet access was to sign up for a wireless data plan with T-Mobile! I don’t use them as my wireless carrier, why would I want a data plan with them for the few days I’ll be in that particular hotel?
Yes, a “real” network is an expensive proposition, no doubt. On the other hand, those of us using our business computers should have pretty robust security apps installed on them. I don’t know that we should need the hotel chain to take that on for us.
July 1st, 2009 at 8:29 am
Until the telepresence systems are interoperable it is not of much use if one is travelling. If the person is out of the office and needs to be present at a company meeting then the telepresence system has to interwork with the system installed in the company. Similar requirement if one needs to teleconference with a business partner.
Hence the primary market for todays proprietary telepresence systems is for closed internal private systems for:-
1. Large companies (like Cisco) used for internal meeting in order to reduce the travel expense.
2. Managed systems that are deployed around around the country that organisations can rent, the motivation is again to reduce travel expense.
Not applicable to the “masses” who cannot even get decent “broadband” connectivity in a hotel and “broadband” technology has been available at least for the last ten years or more.
July 6th, 2009 at 12:48 pm
I agree that Cruise Ships are a different animal and have different challenges: no hardline bandwidth, wireless coverage strategies, etc. However, there is at least one up and coming V/C provider that interoperates with the all of the major providers.
I would add that lowering the “carbon footprint” and regaining “available work hours” are also important to consider with a V/C solution.
The difficulty for small upscale hotels is cost. With fewer endpoints the cost of entry can be daunting. Onle if they can see a ROI from attracting and maintaining their clientele will they make that investment.
July 7th, 2009 at 7:12 am
All of you have very valid comments, I might add (and agree) that bandwidth would probably be the second most important issue that hotels should be dealing with. Although it is almost like the argument of the chicken and the egg. If you don’t have any connectivity, does the amount of (or lack of) bandwidth matter to you? We are seeing more and more hotels upgrading their old analog/digital systems to VoIP. Most VoIP phones (especially those designed for hotels) have a true data jack (Ethernet) that give the customer connectivity, but then you get back to bandwidth. Hopefully carriers will pick up on this need to grant hotels better rates for higher bandwidth so they can offer it so consumers……
Scott Rendell
Tele-Verse Communications
www.tele-verse.com
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