South East Asia has seen a big bang in travel and hospitality sector. The region has an ever growing number of a year over year inbound and outbound tourists. Stay options are scattered in every nook and corner of the region. This growing stay segment is offering a lot of challenges and competitive edge to players in the market. As the alternate stays seem to gain roots in the hearts and mind of the travellers, hotels are on a prowl to experiment with the in-house experience building to inculcate that ogling wow factor.

Technology has been a pivotal mean to bring the millennial with a gripping experience. Until now, the technologies available have suffered from three significant limitations: accuracy, granularity and power consumption. This is where beacons come into the picture. Beacons have been successful in solving problems with respect to location as it is one of the most powerful triggers of action.

Beacons technology has eminently removed front desk formalities and facilitated keyless entries. In-room controls are another aspect where beacons have elevated guest experience. However, future implications could take a different scenario as the technology graduates day by day. Take a look at few areas where beacons can drastically change the way guests experience their stay.

Indoor Navigation

Hotels can enable a mobile user to navigate and interact with specific regions geo-fenced using beacons. These devices can be used to determine the position of a guest in a large hotel, and direct him to his room. These can also be used to build an interactive tour of a hotel or a resort, where users’ attention is directed to specific exhibits as they walk freely within the building.

Real-time offers

In hotel marketing is a major aspect of making a stay comfortable and memorable. Beacons can assist in rewarding push offers while the guest is on a move to the premises. Using beacons, hotels can define targeted ‘micro-locations’ to trigger an alert, an offer or a special discount for a beverage to a guest who is already at the bar.

In-room service

The beacon inside the room is aware that the guest is in the room. The app in the guest’s device is aware of his/her choice of cuisine and other preferences. The guest can have a look at the menu, watch a video of where the ingredients come from and how the dish is prepared. Once he has made his decision, he can place the order.

Limit areas for access to kids

Beacons enable tracking the whereabouts of kids throughout the premises making it easier for the parents to locate them. Plus it also helps to integrate into the package all the purchases made from different locations by the kids.

Analyse customer behaviour for personalization

Beacons can be used for gathering data to gain insights into customer behaviour and use it to improve the overall guest experience. They can be used to measure how much time visitors spend at different locations of the hotel, or which areas are most popular when guests walk around the property. This can add a personalised touch to the entire stay and hence enhance the guest experience.

Since the alternate stay options are cropping up and the market is flooded with making customers happy and their stay experiential, beacons provide a way to differentiate from the competition and by far one of the ways to survive in the industry. For hotels in the midrange to top ends, beacons would add an extra factor to get an edge above the alternate segments.

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The hotel industry has seen major transformation over the past few years. Hotels, especially the ones at the top end of the spectrum are working hard to innovate and add technology to add to the overall experience of travellers. Even the business travellers are slightly shifting towards the leisure side and that is why they have to stay at the top of technology food chain to keep them coming back. From our observations this year, we have listed down the technologies that we will see going mainstream in the hotel industry in 2016. Here are some of them:

#1- Mobile Payments

It has been too long since we have been pulling out our credit cards to pay for things. With the mobile technology giants experimenting with payment services, we will see the mobile payment systems go mainstream. Apple Pay was launched in United States with large number of partners supporting the payment service. Samsung Pay has been designed to work with existing payment gateways and Google is also ready to eat its share of the pie with Android Pay. This year we will see these services being added by more big brands including some major hotels. So it very likely that soon you will be pulling out your phone instead of your credit card to clear the hotel bills.

Lose your wallet to mobile payments

#2- Internet of Things

(Image: Beacons by jnxyz/ CC BY 2.0)

Internet of Things offers infinite possibilities for the hospitality industry. Devices like low energy Bluetooth beacons can be used to determine the position and identity of travellers. This data can be used in multiple ways depending how the hotels choose to use it. They can offer a personalised welcome message and have the key ready or maybe use more of these beacons for indoor navigation to show him the way to his room. This of course can also be used to unlock the room door using mobile phone and bypassing the front desk altogether. We recently spoke with the Madhu, founder of Proxce, a startup that is innovating in this space.

#3- Smart displays

(Image: By Ergonomidesign (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) via Wikimedia Commons)

It is about time the hotel rooms moves away from the conventional setup and brings something fresh to the table. Many hotels are already killing the cable TV in room and offering personal entertainment devices or streaming services on the screen. They are adding such displays in common areas as well to communicate with your devices and offer information. Going forward we will see more hotels adopt this and also add personalisation to the equation. So very soon you might have a hotel room display that shows you your favourite music videos in evening and news in the morning. We might also see more controls for other room electronics offered through the displays.

#4- Robots

We have already started to see robots being added to the hotels. Aloft hotels added Botlr to take care of room service. The tiny robots can carry small items like towels and toiletries to the guest room and can also operate lifts using Wi-FI. These robots have been developed by Savioke which is also working on similar robots for more hotels. Japan has gone even further and the Henn Na hotel almost completely employs robots for everyday hotel operations.

Robot hotels are the future of hospitality

#5- Virtual Reality

(Image: By othree (Google Cardboard) [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons)

Virtual reality is still in the nascent stage but brands are quickly gearing up to ride this coming wave. This year we will see many hotels find use of viewers like Samsung Gear and Google Cardboard. Virtual reality can be used to drive travel inspiration and with more people having reach to VR viewers and content creators having access to the right tools, more luxury hotels will showcase their properties using virtual reality.

What other technologies do you think we will see go mainstream in hotel industry this year?

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Last month, we met Sam Amrani at the RISE Summit in HK and had a quick chat with him on the usage of beacons in the travel industry. Sam, who is the executive chairman at Tamoco, a London based leader in mobile proximity technology and analytics had some interesting insights on how he thinks the beacons will shape up the future of travel. We think beacons are going to be big in this part of the world and we should see a wide-scale adoption from airports to hotels in the coming days. There is an initial awareness challenge that the industry faces that can be potentially overcome with some adoption stories of beacons and how they’ve been used across different verticals.

Here is a short video of our conversation with Sam Amrani from our series TravHQ Talks. To watch out our other video stories, you can subscribe to our YouTube channel.

The post Sam Amrani on how Travel Marketers can use Beacons appeared first on TravHQ.

You reach the Terminal 1D of Indira Gandhi Airport in Delhi for an early morning flight to Mumbai. The moment you step-in, your mobile receives a new notification on where your airline counter is. You also get an exact direction and the distance i.e. the number of steps you have to take. Once you receive your boarding pass and proceed towards the security check, you get a notification on your departure gate making the whole flying process a cakewalk!

Welcome to a completely whole new way to travel with Beacons! What we are talking about isn’t the future of travel. Beacons have been already implemented across many airports, hotels and even points of interests in different countries and expect this to be a part of your travel experience at the world’s best airport sometime very soon.

Beacons by Estimote, Inc: One of the most popular companies out in this space.

What are Beacons?

Beacons re-define the customer experience in physical retail and at all touch-points where there is a real-time interaction involved. Simply speaking, beacons ride on BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) to push targeted and contextual messages to your mobile app the moment you walk-in within their proximity. BLE enables transmission of messages over short distances with a range of few meters using little battery power.

Here is a quick look at how your entire experience is bound to change with Beacons:

Your Hotel Stay

Trouble-free checkin experience

When you check-in to any hotel in India, you undergo a typical drill at the reception where you have to share your passport/photo-id copy (example your pan-card), hotel reservation voucher and then the room is allocated to you. We are so used to a paper driven approach! This adds to your anxiety and if the queue is long, it also tests your patience.

With beacons, your check-in will happen in a jiffy as it will auto detect your name, contact info & your booking details once you step-in to the hotel lobby!

Keyless entry 

Starwood hotels, one of the earliest adopters of this concept has implemented a program called SPG Keyless™ available via SPG® app which enables its guests to have a completely keyless entrance and use their smart-phones to open their room door-locks.

Guests simply need to download the app on their Android or iOS device and need to configure it to receive notifications from a participating property if it has a keyless program implemented. The feature is available to Starwood Preferred Guests and is available across a list of worldwide properties. Unfortunately, none of the Indian cities are present in the list at the moment.

The SPG iOS app

Configuration of Keyless settings on the SPG iOS app

Imagine beacons guiding you about the restaurants in your hotel, their timings, in-room dining services and what not! It opens a whole new world of possibilities altogether

Beacons in your favorite museum or architectural property

Every time you visit a Museum, you either hire a guide or prefer to be self-guided. You stand in-front of those wonderful pieces of art, wondering about their significance and try to read behind the history. Sometimes you get bored and in a way it even limits your experience at these locations of historical significance.

But Philips Museum in Eindhoven is trying something unique with its interactive iBeacon game called Mission Eureka. Watch the video to learn more!!

Does sound exciting indeed? You never know what’s in-store for you, the next time you visit Delhi’s National Museum or Charminar in the city of Nizams

With seamless availability of GPS being a challenge in India, beacons might just provide the much needed boost to the Indian tourism & travel industry. Know of any Indian travel brands using beacons in an interesting way? Do share them with us!

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