New Technology for Hotels: Leveraging Mobility

To truly engage with a highly mobile, always-connected individual, hoteliers need to embrace the technology consumers use today.

Mobility is pervasive in everything we do and the way people use mobile technology is changing dramatically, with customers adopting these changes faster than hoteliers. Today, mobile technology plays an integral role in how people interact and buy. Hoteliers need to address mobility holistically to determine ways to effectively integrate both guest and employee demands into their enterprise architecture, and across the guest life cycle.

New Technology for Hotels: Leveraging Mobility [PDF, 462 KB]

Digital consumers are better informed, connected and engaged across all channels—smartphones, personal computers, stores, tablets and social networking sites. These trends will continue as technology for hotels evolves rapidly. In the lodging industry, customers want to use mobility to interact with products or services in new ways.

Many companies, particularly in the retail and consumer goods industries, are already reaping the benefit of an enhanced relationship with the consumer through mobile technology.

To move forward with a clear direction in offering mobile hospitality solutions, hoteliers must have an overarching mobility strategy that evaluates all the enterprise functions and prioritizes areas of focus along three lines:

• Where to adopt mobility to stay relevant in the industry?

• How to apply it to gain a strategic advantage over the competition?

• How to leverage it to enable new business models?

To maximize success, hoteliers must embrace this new hotel technology; take an end-to-end view of the guest life cycle; and evaluate how a single application or mobile experience can serve as a tool for the guest, from booking to checkout and everything in between. A hotelier’s mobility scope needs to be carefully planned to grow as the organization matures in its mobile enterprise structure and capabilities.

Accenture recommends addressing four key challenges in mobility—the latest technology for hotels:

• Guest mobile applications
• Mobility architecture and governance
• Mobile couponing and loyalty
• Mobile testing

Hotel companies should offer mobile hospitality solutions to deliver benefits to guests in three key areas:

• Better guest experience that aims to increase RevPAR (revenue per available room):

  • Deliver mobile solutions that connect the guest throughout the entire stay.

  • Provide point interaction-relevant services and information.

  • Drive innovation through guest empowerment. (For example, self check-in, mobile room key, virtual concierge and point-of-experience surveying.)

  • Enable “georelevance” and location-based intelligence.

  • Improve guest experience on preferences and location.

  • Enable mobile guest analytics.

• Smart ancillary offers intended to enhance guest satisfaction index (GSI) and loyalty:

  • Deliver personalized, location-based promotions on property for the guest or nonguest.

  • Track what was redeemed, by whom, when and where.

  • Incentivize intelligently based on loyalty preferences and prior usage history to drive nonroom revenue.

  • Create a real-time digital marketplace.

  • Discover new avenues for promotions and offers.

• Point-as-a-currency and mobile payments to help expand payment options while lowering operational costs:

  • Build loyalty by enabling spend for nonroom items with points.

  • Remove paper couponing.

  • Strengthen payments and conversion of offers.

  • Enable digital payment and other offer redemption seamlessly as near-field communication (NFC) and mobile payment goes mainstream.