What is one singular action that your hotel can take to lay a solid foundation for future revenue growth and evolving guest demands? While operations rarely ever boil down to one decisive initiative, our discussions with INTELITY, a leading provider of guest engagement and staff automation platforms, demonstrate that the implementation of in-room tablets may be the closest thing to a silver bullet.

Before getting into a specific property deployment, it’s important to first touch upon the current state of hotels coming out of the pandemic. Managers and associates in all departments are overworked, and the labor shortage shows no signs of abating. This makes automation on all fronts extremely important.

Secondly, it’s time to start thinking about the ‘post-post-pandemic’. This latter half of the bullwhip, likely coming in early 2023, will occur when the glut of pent-up travel demand has leveled off and there’s a need to refocus on optimizing total revenue per guest (TRevPAR) while sustaining current net operating incomes – that is, topline growth with marginal cost. Again, the primary way to achieve this is through technology that can upsell and cross-sell at a static or low-commission SaaS fee.

Why In-Room Tablets Are Now Critical
The smart-room tablets offered by INTELITY show how the near-term pain of installation and staff retraining are far offset by incremental revenues, increased labor productivity and the flexibility to accommodate future service enhancements.

To elaborate on this, smart-room tablets come with the following key advantages:

• Offering a convenient and intuitive user interface for guests to learn about the property, explore the local area and order room service or reserve additional services like spa appointments
• Providing a content-as-a-service (CaaS) channel for personalized promotions and additional TRevPAR as well as third-party advertising revenue sharing
• Addressing basic guest inquiries and automating service orders to reduce the workload that these incur on front desk associates, freeing up their time for other tasks
• Newer tablets (such as the Lenovo Smart Tab M10 running on Android that INTELITY currently recommends) use materials and production methods that increase their durability against drops and corrosion from cleaning or sanitization applications
• Getting more granular data on guest demands to feed into business intelligence software and make highly informed decisions to guide future initiatives
• Acting as the control hub for the totality of IoT-enabled ‘connected room’ features including, but not limited it, thermostats, lighting, alarm clocks, blinds, TVs and smart speakers

Before we get too far into the alphabet soup of all the applicable technology acronyms, what’s most critical here is that your company seek out automation tools as a means of liberating your team from the interruptive busywork that can stress them out and prevent them from rolling out new projects that are necessary for product evolution.

In other words, automation lets you see the whole forest and chart a path instead of endlessly bushwhacking through the trees. Right now, amidst the peak of peak seasons afforded to us by the current travel recovery, this can be hard to devote time towards. And yet it is essential to get underway right now with a firm process for automation deployment so that you don’t try to change too fast and experience service delivery hiccups as a result.

A SoCal Example
Aside from just sitting down with the folks at INTELITY, we also touched base with Tyrone Flowers, the Assistant General Manager at H20 Hermosa Beach. Nestled in this beachside community within the greater Los Angeles area, the H20 property excels offering a relaxed, boutique luxury experience typical for Southern California and expedited the tablet solution installation by recruiting an external IT team to handle the setup amidst ongoing high occupancies.

“As may be apparent already, we were looking for a smart-room tablet solution that would help introduce guests to the area and alleviate our command center, the front desk,” commented Flowers. “Being walking distance from the beach, we get a lot of families and sporting tournament guests, translating into lots of different needs and questions from this healthy blend of corporate and leisure. The tablets have helped us to quickly answer some of these inquiries and relay service requests so that we can maintain our local market leadership.”

While the most popular usages for in-room tablets vary by brand and territory, Flowers remarked that the guests at H20 were particularly keen on using these devices for completing minibar purchases as well as the occasional housekeeping request to help round out a great onsite experience.

Overall, Flowers highlights that the tablet solution at H20 will nonetheless require some finessing as guest behaviors change. Like practically any other initiative, it is a work in progress and that needs reevaluation and tweaking.

Once installed, though, it is easier to execute future upgrades because the hotel team has more bandwidth to focus on the rapid turnaround of these updates. Again, it all comes down to time and enabling your team for both near-term and long-term success. Our hope is that, from this example and the bullet points above, you consider what smart-room tablets can do for your hotel brand.