How tech is helping hotels create tomorrow’s guest experience today

Guests arriving at a hotel are usually tired after a long flight or train ride, and often face a few inconveniences on their way.

Once they reach the hotel, they expect a friendly smile, a warm welcome, and a comfortable experience – and the key to that, in the modern world, lies in using a bit of technology.

According to Deloitte, one of the best ways to transform the “guest experience” is to embrace cognitive technologies.

Organizations that depend upon information can build a cognitive advantage when they combine big data technologies with cognitive computing capabilities to extract insight from data that previously went unused or underused.

Based on their research, the organization finds that today’s hotel staff can amplify their intelligence with cognitive capabilities to create smarter insights that help improve core operations, build new assets, and enhance decision making.

Cognitive capabilities can enhance the guest experience by enabling the hotel to serve them better – by facilitating repeatable tasks using automation in order to free up hotel teams.

The consulting giant’s report suggests three capabilities that hotels can slowly build up in the future to exponentially improve or even completely transform the guest experience they provide:

Robotics and cognitive automation

There are some human actions and even judgments that machines can replicate using robotics and cognitive technologies, according to Deloitte.

Such systems can help hotels automate repeatable tasks—not only to improve efficiency but also to free up the frontline team to engage in more high-value tasks that machines cannot accomplish.

The laborious task of blocking rooms, for example, can be automated quite easily using a trained algorithm or “machine”.

Doing so will free up the front desk agent to proactively reach out to arriving guests to ensure they’re received with the friendly smile that we mentioned earlier.

Cognitive insights

Cognitive technologies can help uncover hidden patterns in data to identify opportunities for the kind of growth, diversification, and efficiencies that large-scale organizational intelligence can bring about.

Deloitte believes that this puts the analytics to work to find the “aha” insights and allows the hotel to focus on consuming and executing on them.

Instead of having a lengthy guest profile with outdated preferences and lengthy guest notes from previous stays, predictive intelligence can use a combination of all available data pooled to provide a predicted activity for a team member to execute in order to positively influence that specific guest’s experience.

This information can then be fed to frontline personnel on a device/screen when the guest is standing in front of him or her – providing exciting opportunities to delight the guests.

Is the hotel check-in desk really about to be replaced by automation? Turns out it's not as straightforward as you think… https://t.co/rC9yEvlQed #Hospitality #Tech pic.twitter.com/5b4XIOhwv7

— Genie (@Genie_Phone) March 22, 2018

Cognitive engagement

Today, intelligent agents and avatars can deliver mass consumer personalization at scale.

Deloitte believes that it can help hotels create smarter, more relevant insights that amplify the end user’s experience.

For example, Deloitte suggests that a hotel uses this approach to generate personalized recommendations to guests and deploy digital assistants to interact with them—turning former nuisances, such as food delivery, parcel receipt, or check-in, into streamlined, even pleasurable experiences.

The robo-advisers that bring customized recommendations and transaction performance to the field of personal wealth management are already working in a similar way.

Introducing Ivy, your new cognitive hotel concierge https://t.co/KIUfsXicOI #IBMcognitive pic.twitter.com/3nYP1puAlp

— Lisa Wright (@LisaWright50) January 8, 2018