You hop on a flight from New York to Hawaii. Before take-off, you tweet, "Headed to Hawaii. Looking forward to drink pool side @HawaiiResortHotel."
When you land and turn your mobile on, you have a Twitter response from @HawaiiResortHotel, "We look forward to having you, shall we reserve you a lounge chair?" - it's this level of immediate interactive response that a new class of connected travelers are expecting. The hotel environment is changing drastically and, over the next ten years, innovation based around each individual guest will be at the top of the agenda.
This innovation will focus on establishing a simplified approach to enable hoteliers to provide a personalized and a seamless guest experience - take for example, upon check-in, you are provided an iPad pre-loaded with the hotel's branded app. It offers the concierge's suggestions for dining, entertainment and sightseeing, and provides quick-access to purchase theater tickets, transportation, room service and more.
Not just that, upon check-out with a simple text message the hotel will take care of your boarding pass for your flight back home. You reach New York to find a tweet from the hotel with a promotional code for a complimentary upgrade for your next visit.
According to the IBM Institute for Business Value "Hotel 2020" outlook report, many hotel chains are seeing the opportunity for expansion over the next decade, thanks to recent signs of economic recovery and growth forecasts around the world. At the same time, hotel chains are experiencing intense competition as guests expect more in the way of personalized services, but want their room rates to stay low.
Today's hotel guests are demanding intense personalization - hotels will need to be customizable in order to respond to this need and branding partnerships will play a key role in this changing dynamic. Guests want far more say over the delivery of the hotel experience from the services that are offered to how they are delivered.
Take mobile phones and tablets as an example. A recent survey of 1,200 travelers around the globe showed that 40 percent of today's travelers frequently research hotel and accommodation using these devices. By itself, that's not surprising. What is surprising, is that just under half - 47 percent - of those same respondents said that they frequently use mobile devices to make mid-trip changes.
Providing the right service over the right medium for on-property services is already becoming crucial. Analytics and intelligent technology that can help anticipate changing customer requirements are critical to compete for the consumer's wallet. Hotels today must be a technology-rich environment; rooms that can configure themselves to a guest's choice be it room temperate, television programming choices or selections from the mini bar.
Global consumers are exposed to premium services on a daily basis. Over time, these experiences translate into expectations, or minimum standards of performance. A decade ago, few hotels offered in-room, low-cost, high-speed Internet services. Today, most hotels have incorporated a wide range of wired and wireless service into their offerings because guests have come to expect it. As the demands of consumers evolve, so, too, should hotels in meeting those demands.
The hospitality industry is at the very core of the globalization of international business. Hotels today need to consider the implications of the global context in which they operate with a personalized view of their guests and needs. This view must ensure that a consistent, branded service is delivered from property to property; social networks and travel rating sites provide ample channels for customer complaints on service inconsistency to do considerable damage.
Emerging trends ranging from mobilization to social chatter and globalization is changing the definition of today's interactive guest and shaping the future of the hospitality industry. Hotels that recognize these forces and embrace innovative means of meeting this standard in their day-to-day operations are likely to outpace their competitors.
This article is copyrighted by Travelers Today, the travel news leader
