by Mia Taylor
Last updated: 11:00 AM ET, Mon December 24, 2018
From robotic staff members to iPads at your bedside and hotel apps to address your every whim and desire, technology has certainly found its footing in the hotel world.
But some industry insiders say hotels of the future (and by future, we're talking about 2019) will not solely be relying on guest-facing technologies to manage the customer experience.
Alex Shashou, a co-founder of the hotel operations platform ALICE, believes the largest hotel trend of 2019 will be revitalizing or significantly stepping up the concept of hospitality and doing so via the increased use of behind the scenes technology.
"Travel is something many people value above sex, cars, and coffee. The millennial generation, in particular, is expecting to have travel in their lives," said Shashou. "So, for hotels ultimately their job is to create a home away from home or an office away from the office. But if hotels are only focused on price, they will never survive. And if they want to be able to charge more, they need to have something else to add to their competitive advantage."
"A hotel is not going to be able to move its location, and upgrading rooms every year gets expensive," continued Shashou. "The only variable is the service you deliver and that doesn't mean adding crazy robots. It means offering guests everything they have at home."
Hotels, contends Shashou, must focus on putting an infrastructure in place that allows them to understand everything that's happening and on top of that, add a layer of personalization for the guest that is unforgettable and loyalty building.
"Many hotels right now operate in disconnected silos, which makes it really difficult to understand and personalize the experience for guests," said Shashou.
It is with such notions in mind that Shashou co-founded ALICE, a platform that's playfully named after the housekeeper in the popular television show The Brady Bunch.
Designed to manage staff work and guest communication across departments, through ALICE a guest can communicate directly with a hotel via an app, text messaging or Facebook. But perhaps more importantly, the app unifies all hotel operations on one single communications platform, something that has not been previously done before in the hotel industry.
In other words: maintenance, housekeeping, the concierge, the front desk and more are all on ALICE
"We've built really the first operations platform that empowers meaningful guest experiences," says Shashou, who spent six years living in a hotel and identifying every meaningful point of interaction.
ALICE'S centralized platform can dispatch workers, communicate with guests and it allows all departments to work together, he said.
Hotel staff receive requests for service via a Smart device, rather than for instance, a guest calling down to the front desk when there is a problem and the front desk, in turn, calling maintenance or whichever department may be required.
"In this day and age everyone has a phone and every phone has text messaging," explained Shashou. "With ALICE you text your request and the job immediately goes to the person responsible, eliminating multiple steps and removing bottlenecks."
ALICE can also begin that personalization long before a guest arrives onsite, sending a text message to let the guest know the property is looking forward to their arrival, for example.
The platform was designed with the goal of improving guest satisfaction and helping hotels achieve operational excellence, enabling staff to interact with both the guest and each other to deliver the best service possible.
Ultimately the beauty of the ALICE platform, however, is that it allows for implementing a level of personalization that previously was only expected at five-star properties. ALICE makes it easy for true personalization to trickle down to four-star, and even three-star hotels.
"By being able to understand who the guests are and personalize their experience, they're going to have a better experience and become a more loyal customer. And then the hotel evolves from a commodity to a luxury," said Shashou.
The technology is already in use in at Nordic Choice Hotels; The Leading Hotels of the World; Dream Hotels; Viceroy; Yotel; The Willamsburg Hotel; and Las Vegas Plaza Hotel & Casino, among others.
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