SmartBeings is a Silicon Valley-based solution provider and the developer of WooHoo®, an award-winning enterprise-grade voice AI assistant speaker for the luxury hospitality industry. The WooHoo® Voice AI Assistant speakers (powered by JBL by Harman) combine a phone, alarm clock, speakers, tablets and voice assistant into an all-in-one device and brings the convenience of contactless in-room ordering and automation using just voice commands.

With a completely customizable interface, including preferred wake words, hotels can now personalize their branding and engagement. Guests can also use the multi-lingual touch commands to make requests, phone calls and check F&B menu digitally directly on the WooHoo® device.

Leia is the leading provider of Lightfield hardware and content services for mobile devices. Leia’s Lume Pad is the first 3D Lightfield Tablet in the world that lets you experience 3D imagery with a natural sensation of depth and feel for textures, materials, and lights — no eyewear required. The Lume Pad — Hospitality Edition will fully integrate with WooHoo®’s Hospitality platform to help upsell in-room services and further uplift the guest experience.

WooHoo® is integrated with more than 40 hospitality technology solutions, including property management systems, in-room automation, housekeeping, point of sales systems, and PBX. With WooHoo® technologies integrated with Dhiraagu smart hospitality solutions, hotel guests can now order food & beverages, toiletries, play music, get instant answers to their queries, call reception and control room temperature, lighting, or curtains, among other many interactions through a simple voice command.

Keeping safety and wellness in mind, WooHoo is also integrated with telemedicine companies and can provide guests with immediate medical consultations. Guests staying in these hotels can also access WooHoo® Hospitality AI Assistant using their mobile phones by simply scanning QR Codes

As the COVID-19 pandemic has heavily impacted the hospitality industry across the globe, it is a common understanding that the tourism landscape will not be the same even after the lockdowns and travel restrictions have been lifted. The road to recovery will be even far more challenging. WooHoo® is designed to help minimize the need for physical contact, provide telehealth and enabling guest requests to be attended via a voice assistant.

“We are happy to be collaborating with Silicon Valley companies like SmartBeings Inc and their partners Leia Inc to offer a contactless Voice Assistant, to support our hospitality partners where they can digitize their guest experience in resorts, rooms, restaurants, beaches, entertainment, and daily tasks,” said Mahmoud Dasser, Chief Marketing Officer at Dhiraagu. “We want to help them connect and optimize their operations while they ensure the guests are safe when delivering a luxurious experience.”

“We are excited to collaborate with Dhiraagu, the leading digital service provider in the Maldives,” said Himanshu Kaul, Chief Innovation Officer at SmartBeings. “With a huge demand for Contactless solutions, WooHoo® is powered by next-generation cognitive AI platform where brands can customize and redefine a luxurious experience with the power of voice. We are fast expanding into other markets, as well.”

“We are excited to bring Lightfield imagery to the world of luxury hospitality through this partnership,” said David Fattal, Leia’s co-founder and CEO. “Combining voice commands and holographic interactions creates the perfect marriage to elevate the guest experience and create new revenue streams for hoteliers.”

Dhiraagu has continued to bring innovative business solutions to its customers. The expansion of a comprehensive product portfolio and collaborative partnerships is a true testament to Dhiraagu’s commitment to enriching lives through digital services. For more information, please click here or contact info@smartbeings.com

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Volara’s integration into the hotel’s operations platform from ALICE drives additional efficiencies, as all item and service requests are seamlessly routed to the appropriate department for fulfillment of each command. Whether guests request an item (“Hey Google, bring a bottle of champagne”), schedule a service (“Hey Google, bring my car around front”), seek recommendations (“Hey Google, where I can get a good steak?”) or just need to know how to access a hotel amenity (“Hey Google, how do I connect to the WiFi?”), the highly-secure privacy-centric voice technology will streamline all guest communication and give visitors a way to connect virtually to those who will make their stays exceptional.

“When guests return, everyone who walks through our doors will have an extraordinary stay,” said Gale South Beach General Manager Kevin Waldstein. “Being closed since March, we’ve used the downtime to invest in tools and technologies that will ensure a clean, sanitary, and contactless environment; adding that the solution from Google and Volara was the first step in our contactless initiative, and guests will be blown away by the convenience. With people quarantined at home for so many months, they’ve become familiar and comfortable with smart speakers. It’s exciting that we have that same type of voice-on-command experience at The Gale — and soon at our sister hotel the Shelborne South Beach will add Volara to ensure consistency across the Menin Hospitality portfolio. We can’t wait to see people engaging with Volara. It will surely drive them to connect with our staff and benefit from our services while remaining safe and socially distant.”

Volara provides platform agnostic voice-based conversation-management software and a secure integrations hub for existing hospitality technologies. Its software turns the major natural language processing platforms into a business tool that drives more efficient customer service, influences guests’ behavior, improves net promoter scores and helps hospitality providers understand travelers better.

Volara’s software is enabling the hotel to manage conversations with its guests in real-time. Its secure integrations hub, which now includes 40+ hotel technologies, is enabling guests’ requests to prompt specific actions – whether routing a task to hotel staff, turning off the lights, or putting on the air conditioning. Volara’s software also enables additional layers of security to ensure that guests’ privacy is protected, and proprietary hotel data is secure. Volara is the only provider of voice-based solutions to the hospitality industry that has the Alexa for Business Service Delivery Designation from Amazon, is a launch partner of Alexa for Hospitality, and is an authorized solution provider for the Google Assistant Interpreter Mode and Google’s Hotel Solutions.

“Even before COVID-19, hotels were embracing voice technology as a means of engaging guests,” said David Berger, Volara CEO. “Today, with contactless service becoming the norm, people are getting more accustomed to having their needs met with little to no personal interaction. Guests who are constantly asking Siri or Google or Alexa  questions while at home, can now expect to have an even better more tailored on-command experience while in their hotel rooms.

“As a technology-forward hotel company, Menin Hospitality is anticipating its guests’ needs and doing everything possible today to elevate the touchless travel experience of tomorrow, starting with voice,” he added. “The Gale and Shelborne are ready, willing, and able to greet guests and keep them engaged in a way that only Volara can. We are delighted to add Menin Hospitality to our client portfolio, and we look forward to working with them on even more deployments soon.”

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With physical distancing and contact tracing becoming the new normal, hoteliers can no longer pay lip service to this medium. The coronavirus has accelerated the trend of making a guest’s phone the primary point of communication to the hotel’s staff, and as such we all need to devote our resources to make the mobile experience frictionless and omnipresent.

It’s always interesting to consider how you can alter your on-property services and upstream product messaging to capitalize upon this profound paradigm shift. Think beyond the required messaging apps for services provided by the onsite staff. In a mobile-everything world, hoteliers must think of ways to amplify their hotel experiences purely through digital means and without the time-honored ability to ingratiate yourself with customers via in-person “service with a smile.”

One question can perhaps summarize this dilemma succinctly: how is your concierge better than a Google search? That is to say, for a guest who is adept at finding and arranging whatever they want via their mobile devices what is the value-add of having a dedicated concierge? Extrapolate this out to numerous other functions that the average smartphone performs and you can easily see how modern travelers may be apathetic to many of the services you tout as features to help sell rooms.

Wake up calls or guestroom alarm clocks? Not only do phones perform this task satisfactorily – and now also in a more sanitized manner – but there are specific memory functions built within these devices to remember a person’s typical sleep cycle. And as for getting directions, restaurant recommendations or local area information, there are a bevy of apps or third-party websites with user reviews to inform visitors as to what’s best in the area. All your guests need from you is fast WiFi and they are accustomed, nay entertained, by doing the rest of the process themselves. This DIY nature of mobile everything behavior does not engender guests to view your hotel as any different than the competition.

And yet, these services are still promoted as key selling points on brand.com websites and the OTAs, even though the average post-Covid traveler would feel far safer attaining these things from their own phones thus rendering the features irrelevant. From the guest’s point of view, they now have no tangible benefit to differentiate your product, and so you must adapt these services accordingly.

In rethinking what you offer thorough your onsite hotel experience so that it actually has an emotional impact on mobile-first guests, remember that anything Google can do, you should not try to compete with. Retraining of your concierge and front desk means you should look to exclusive deals or intimately knowing the immediate area so that you can provide the utmost in convenience. The coronavirus has had sweeping consequences in terms of what businesses are open or not and what the new rules are for each in terms of capacities or PPE regulations. Oftentimes, small businesses haven’t kept their Google business listings properly up to date, so there’s an opportunity here for your team to shine.

As another example, a quick web search on a smartphone will elicit the top restaurants in a city, but a concierge should be able to find exactly the right place to eat based upon the point-in-time needs of a guest or group, while also factoring in revised hours of operation, post-Covid reopening promos, social distancing measures or gratis meal inclusions for sending the guests to a particular restaurant. The same promotional agreements might also be ironed out with sightseeing attractions, park trails, outdoor activities, shopping centers, individual stores or limited-time events.

While a lot of this involves negotiated partnerships with local providers, technology upgrades are instrumental because these updated features will only be meaningful to guests if they know in advance of their stays that they are available. You need strong language across all third-party OTAs that your team has the ‘inside edge’ on what the neighborhood can currently offer due to Covid, including private discounts and exclusive access that would be otherwise unattainable via public routes.

Next are the marketing channels that are wholly within your control. First, there is your website, for which there are a few vendors who are able to curate local content and keep it updated. Otherwise, you can undoubtedly recruit a web developer to install a plugin so guests have a good user interface by which to browse through all the partnership promos you offer to those individuals with a reservation as well as all new safety or cleanliness measures. Second are your prearrival communications whereby you have another chance to upsell guests on local activities and deals through well-honed messaging on these emails.

Ultimately, it all comes back to the aforementioned question about how your team can compete against an entity as omniscient as the Google search algorithm and all the other aggregated third-party travel or restaurant websites. With the coronavirus throwing a wrench in everything, you can prosper by being the voice of reassurance. To compete, though, you will need to both reinvigorate those local relationships and you will need to broadcast these partnerships across all your top-of-funnel marketing channels so that guests are more motivated to book with you because of these unique offers.

One of the world’s most published writers in hospitality, Larry Mogelonsky is the principal of Hotel Mogel Consulting Limited, a Toronto-based consulting practice. His experience encompasses hotel properties around the world, both branded and independent, and ranging from luxury and boutique to select-service. Larry is also on several boards for companies focused on hotel technology. His work includes five books, “Are You an Ostrich or a Llama?” (2012), “Llamas Rule” (2013), “Hotel Llama” (2015), “The Llama is Inn” (2017) and “The Hotel Mogel” (2018). You can reach Larry at larry@hotelmogel.com to discuss hotel business challenges or to book speaking.

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The in-room tablet is a guest-facing mobile device that is always open and always communicating. Not only does the tablet provide general service information on the hotel and city, but it also facilitates roomservice, sends message alerts, gives guests choices over room cleaning times or opting out of housekeeping altogether, controls the room environment (lights, drapes, temperature, Do Not Disturb, and TV), streamlines check out, sends surveys, shares loyalty club information, facilitates service requests, charges guests’ personal mobile devices, and provides alarm clock functionality. Soon, these guestroom command centers will also be capable of streaming music via Bluetooth speakers in the charging bases and supporting guests’ requests on voice command using Far-Field Speech and Voice Recognition technology also housed in the base.

The communication reach of tablets is not confined to just the guestroom; operators are leveraging these devices to also connect guests to convention/meeting planners, retail outlets, recreational spaces, and the community. Why then, with an estimated 17 million guestrooms worldwide, are less than 100,000 rooms equipped with these smart devices?

The 2020 Lodging Technology Study cites Business Intelligence (48%), Point of Sale (39%), Predictive Analysis (39%), Customer Experience (36%), and Internet of Things (33%) as top enterprise software investments for 2020. The data collected, analyzed and leveraged by each one of these separate technologies can also be derived through tablets. When it comes to guest-facing technology investments, the study shows that hoteliers are adding for the first time, upgrading or changing suppliers related to Instant Messaging (45%), CRM/Loyalty (33%), and Interactive Digital Signage (23%). Guess what? Each of these are functions of today’s tablets too.

What appears to be missing from this study is data on the in-room tablet investment this year. So, I did some research and learned from the survey group that only 6% of hoteliers plan to add in-room tablets for first time, 3% are upgrading, and 72% have no plans to change from what they are currently offering. Unfortunately, the legacy tablets (or in-room computers) introduced a decade ago as a digital answer to printed compendiums and roomservice menus — and even newer tablets of 2015 and beyond — don’t have near the functionality or data management tools of today’s tablets. So why the wait-and-see approach?

The answer is simple: some hoteliers are under the misconception that tablets will soon be replaced by Apps or Smart Televisions. Neither is correct. If you want to invest in IoT, the smart money is on tablets. Here’s why …

Apps vs. Tablets

App Fatigue is running rampant. Statista estimates there were around 230 billion app downloads in 2019 or roughly 630 million app downloads each day. The company predicts that number will grow to 258.2 billion by 2022. Considering that the average U.S. consumer spends more time using apps than watching TV (Social Media Today) — the average person spends 198 minutes or 3.3 hours per day — hoteliers will be hard-pressed to make their apps download-worthy and compete for travelers’ attention. Especially since most consumers engage with apps for social media, music, video and gaming. None of those elements can be found on a hotel’s app – but they can ALL be leveraged via an in-room tablet.

Getting guests to engage with tablets isn’t difficult; rather, it’s the way guests prefer to interact with the hotel. According to the most recent JD Powers research, offering an in-room tablet increases overall guest satisfaction by as much as 47 points due to the communication system’s ability to engage guests and entice them to use the system by featuring information relevant to their stay. The guest satisfaction study further showed that only 15% of guests will download the hotel’s app, of those only 46% will use it during their stay, leaving the hotel with an actual take-rate of 7% usage of their mobile app. This makes the tablet — or in-room billboard — the only logical choice.

So, instead of developing an app because you think you should, there is far more value and a quicker investment return on installing in-room tablets to meet guest and operational needs. Better yet, no one will have to deal with app downloads or the cost of app development.

TVs vs. Tablets

There is speculation that the next step for the hotel room TVs is to command the guestroom. Sure, it can control lights, thermostats and more through interfaces to peripheral room technologies. It can also let guests stream their personal service programming, such as Netflix, Hulu Plus or Amazon Prime or stream music from Pandora or Spotify. But the TV must be “turned on” to gain any benefits. With travelers bringing their own entertainment devices while on the road, oftentimes they remain connected to their smart phones and laptops instead – especially if the hotel doesn’t offer streaming capabilities.

Some argue that the TV should be the command center since guests are facing the device most of the time while in the room. Tablets, however, are strategically placed on the bed-side table, equally visible and close at hand when the guest needs it. More importantly, those devices are “always on.” Customizable welcome screens draw guests’ attention, making them want to engage with the hotel. While most units are programmed to “go dark” after 11:00 p.m. (as to not interfere with guests’ sleep), the devices can be awakened with just a touch and used continuously if desired.

When the TV is turned on, it is generally broadcasting movies or news; guests don’t typically use the TV as source of information or transactions. Some hotels set-up dedicated stations to provide hotel and local-area information, but viewing is limited. When people want that type of information, it’s easier for them to search by smartphone, tablet or laptop. Then there’s the clunky handheld controller. Have you tried to type anything using a hotel TV remote? It’s enormously frustrating, so guests turn it off. When that happens, the TV stops communicating. That means the hotel has lost the ability to reach the guest.

The real benefit of the in-room TV is its large screen, making viewing easy from anywhere. But requiring guests to navigate through multiple menus to turn light on/off, temperature up/down, request morning coffee, or deliver room service — forget about it. It’s simply not practical to expect guests to order food and beverage from the TV using the clumsy interface and guest experience that the remove provides. Instead, placing that function on a tablet conforms to existing usage patterns, and gets extremely high engagement.

Remember the HNN 2020 Hotel Trend Report I mentioned in the beginning of this article? They also predicted “there will no longer be desks in the room because millennial travelers are more likely to work while sitting in bed.” That work will likely come by way of a tablet or laptop — certainly not by navigating menu screens via TV remote control.

Do you want to enable guests to stream music from Pandora or Spotify? Send it to the tablet docking station that is equipped with high-quality audio speakers. Want to enable guests to order roomservice from local restaurants vs. having to manage your own operation? Outsource the service to the tablet provider. Want to offer mobile-device charging via new alarm clock/radios but don’t have the budget for equipment? Let guests power up through the tablet dock and set alarms on the tablet. Need to reduce operating expenses? Encourage guests to opt out of room cleaning with instant alert messages on the tablet. Hope to reach every event delegate with special offers, promos and meeting materials? Set up a communication channel on the tablet. Wish you had voice technology that enables guests to speak requests but can’t afford to add smart speakers? Add voice-enabled microphones to the dock. These capabilities and many more are already available to hotels.

The bottom line is this: Tablets are the only way to reach 100% of guests. My prediction for 2025 is that Tablets — not Apps, not TVs — will be the No. 1 in-room appliance for controlling the guestroom.

Richard Carruthers is Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer of Hotel Communication Network (HCN), an Ottawa, Ontario, Canada provider of innovative high-value in-room tablets that keeps each guest connected to their hotel, city and each other.

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This is due to both labor conditions and the mounting guest expectation for exceedingly fast service. Together, this means that you need to expedite or automate as much as of the ‘grunt work’ as possible so that your human team can take the time to focus on the people standing right in front of them.

Rather than replacing your front office team, here are five fundamental aspects to investigate for how technology can enable your associates to be insurmountably better at their jobs.

1. Cross-departmental integration. With service moving fast, you can no longer let any request get congested by a lack of communication between different siloed platforms, not only to improve team efficiency but also to minimize errors and heighten personalization. Customer service reps must be able to quickly push the necessary information to other departments like housekeeping or maintenance as well as to the PMS or CRM.
2. Respond from anywhere at any time. Working remotely is a trend that even hospitality cannot ignore. And with the expectation for immediate answers to guest inquiries, you must look into platforms that can route all incoming messages to a single dashboard so various team members can respond from their homes or anywhere on-property, and at any time of day or night.
3. Concierge exclusivity. How does your concierge or front desk provide information to guests that is above and beyond what someone would find through a Google search? Given the omniscience of the internet, you must now reinvent this service offering by intricately knowing the ‘hyper-local’ neighborhood around your hotel as well as setting up private discounts with regional providers that one cannot attain elsewhere.
4. Rapid recovery with mid-stay satisfaction scores. If a guest hasn’t had the best of experiences at your property, how then can you change their minds when they’ve already left? Instead, consider sending them a quick survey after check-in or at the end of the first night so that negative reviews can be flagged and remedied prior to departure.
5. Chatbots and artificial intelligence. To reiterate the core idea behind these necessary upgrades, it is all about enabling your team to provide better team by ensuring that they aren’t bogged down in the minutia of minor tasks and nonstop paperwork. To that end, I’ve seen some fantastic chatbot programs on the market that can help to field all the basic questions posed by guests so that your live agents then have more time to focus on the headier requests.

As it is now 2020, the new decade will see these sorts of support for your guest communications transition from value-adds to mandatory for effective service delivery. If you haven’t already set aside budget for platforms that can address some of these five points, then start investigating your options in the coming months to then make sure there is adequate budget set aside from next year.

One of the world’s most published writers in hospitality, Larry Mogelonsky is the principal of Hotel Mogel Consulting Limited, a Toronto-based consulting practice. His experience encompasses hotel properties around the world, both branded and independent, and ranging from luxury and boutique to select-service. Larry is also on several boards for companies focused on hotel technology. His work includes five books, “Are You an Ostrich or a Llama?” (2012), “Llamas Rule” (2013), “Hotel Llama” (2015), “The Llama is Inn” (2017) and “The Hotel Mogel” (2018). You can reach Larry at larry@hotelmogel.com to discuss hotel business challenges or to book speaking.

This article may not be reproduced without the expressed permission of the author.

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The NEW 2020 hotel experience is smart-speaker centric and it involves connecting these devices to the TV, thermostat, live-streaming radio services and other hotel systems to make the guest experience more natural and like home — actually better than home.

eMarketer predicts that 118 million people will rely on voice assistants this year, with the number growing to 123 million by 2021. Therefore, bringing smart speakers into the guestroom experience to improve communication and efficiencies is just smart business.

Wanting the Viceroy Hotels & Resorts experience to feel like a natural extension of our guests’ daily lives, we made the commitment to go “all in” with voice technology last year. To do this, we had to find a technology partner that was innovative, flexible, customizable and could easily integrate with existing property technologies. It also needed to meet the complex technical specifications of our hotels while simultaneously adhering to our obligation to ensure guest privacy.

While the quest seemed to be a steep challenge, after doing our diligence we were drawn to Volara — as its enterprise grade conversation management software and platform agnostic approach enabled the flexibility and security required by our hotels. Their software was proven out in peer hotels across the globe and the data driving their automated conversation models was informed by voice-based interactions with more than 10 million hotel guests. The aggregated data was central to the solution’s ability to accurately reply to our guests’ complex requests and that made a big difference.  Alexa itself seemed like a good choice given its consumer adoption, but Volara really made it work for the hotel environment.

Success from the Start

Before embarking on our own journey with voice, I was familiar with a few hotels that had tried launching home grown voice programs with limited success. Utilization rates were low, and their ownership was rightly concerned they hadn’t done what was necessary to safeguard their guests’ personally identifiable information. Complaints outnumbered positive reviews and the programs were cancelled before they really got out of the gate.

To the contrary, the conversation-management software and seamless integrations enabling the voice solution at Viceroy Hotels & Resorts creates a hotel business tool atop Alexa. It’s because of this innovative, flexible and customizable technology that we are seeing exceptional utilization rates, delivering an optimal guest experience, driving meaningful efficiencies, and scaling personal — even traditional — hospitality.

Volara’s software had integrations to more than 40 hotel technologies, including interactive television, room controls, PBX, music, and work order-management. Guests staying at our Viceroy L’Ermitage Beverly Hills, for example, are controlling lighting, Do Not Disturb/Make up Room settings, and room temperature through Volara’s integration to INNCOM by Honeywell. They are using their voices to control the TV (from changing channels to adjusting the volume) through integration to Sonifi. They are listening to Viceroy curated playlists or asking Alexa to play their preferred music genre via integration to iHeartRadio.

Nearly all our guests are using the smart speaker to request hotel service information and amenities (from outlet open/close times, directions, and local area attractions to pillows, toothbrushes, minibar refreshments and more). This is possible due to Volara’s connection to the ALICE Hotel Operations Platform. Having these integrations in place made deployment of this highly successful voice program quick and easy.

Ensuring the highest levels of guest privacy and hotel data security was the final piece to our implementation puzzle. Volara ensures that recordings of guests are never associated with their personally identifiable information. All recordings of guests are deleted within 24 hours — a distinct difference from the management of user recordings in the consumer environment. The company also ensures that any hotel technologies that enhance the voice-based experience are securely integrated (meaning, there is no leakage of hotel proprietary data to Amazon itself).

Although my technical diligence confirmed the solution was secure for guest use, we expected that some of our guests may still be skeptical — so together with the Volara team we implemented a guest education process and trained the hotel staff on how to respond to guests questions.

No Risk, Just Reward

Guests are certainly having fun with the Alexa devices. Feedback on review sites and from post-stay surveys has been positive. While satisfaction scores continue to rise, the measurable cost savings have as well. We are seeing a substantial improvement in delivery time for any guest requests through Alexa and guests are enjoying the added convenience of just saying “Alexa, call the front desk” or “Alexa, call the concierge,” to connect with our staff without having to pick up the phone. The easier we make it to connect with staff, the happier our guests will be and the more often they will return.

We’ve been able to increase hotel revenues, reduce labor costs and streamline operations because the integrated voice platform is giving guests instant access to the information and services that are important to them.

Throughout 2020 we will be deploying smart speakers at all Viceroy hotels as we further optimize how our guests are interacting and engaging by voice command. We are in discussions with Volara to develop a service for meeting planners and social groups to use voice commands to control lighting, start video presentations, order food and beverage, and place additional requests from meeting rooms.

We are also brainstorming back-of-house applications to streamline engineering tasks, enable room status changes, and facilitate staff-to-staff communications. Finally, we are researching the viability of interfacing an AI chatbot with Volara to make these voice interactions and experiences more personal for guests and more efficient for operators.

As travel becomes even more data driven, it is foreseeable that a guest could name the qualities they are seeking in an excursion and, based on an algorithm, the smart speaker will recommend more precise detailed recommendations, all with a conversation rather than searching on laptop or mobile. Though guests care about keeping their personal data secure, research shows that many are willing to share proactively if it means a more personalized experience.

The bottom line is this: voice is here to stay. Hoteliers should start to embrace the technology and implement it within their brands immediately if they want to remain competitive. By simply looking at the annual stats, you can see that consumers are using voice daily for everything from search, to information, to room controls within their homes. They love the frictionless experience of voice technologies.

Now that the proper enterprise controls and management features are in place, why not bring this technology within the hotel and interface to key hotel systems to enhance the guest experience?

Darren Clark is VP of Technology for Viceroy Hotels & Resorts. Darren is a technology specialist who has over 20 years of experience in Hospitality IT and emerging technologies. Throughout his career he has worked in a VP role for established hospitality companies such as Starwood Hotels & Resorts, Fairmont Hotels, Andre Balazs Hotels and Standard Hotels International. His career has gained invaluable experience for the luxury, boutique and lifestyle sectors in both the hotel and residential fields. The Viceroy Icon Collection properties include epic hotels and resorts in Los Cabos, Chicago, Beverly Hills, Riviera Maya, Snowmass, and St. Lucia, with forthcoming openings in Serbia, Algarve and Panama. The Viceroy Lifestyle Series hotels and resorts are found in attitude-led destinations such as Santa Monica. The Viceroy Urban Retreats in San Francisco and Washington D.C. have an independent spirit and bold, eccentric personalities. Viceroy Hotels & Resorts is a member of the Global Hotel Alliance (GHA) DISCOVERY, a unique loyalty program offering exclusive benefits and experiences to its members at over 500 hotels around the world.

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To eliminate language barriers and engage more deeply with guests, Google has developed a voice translation technology spanning languages that is now being made available to hotels worldwide through a distribution partnership with Volara. This new feature on the Google Assistant, called interpreter mode, is designed to facilitate real-time translation between two people. This technology can improve the quality of interactions between hotel staff and guests, resulting in better communications and high-value service.

By placing Google Nest Hub devices – provisioned by Volara with enterprise grade management tools and custom branded hotel content – at their front desks or concierge stations, foreign-speaking travelers can speak commands in their native tongue and have those requests translated accurately and in real time.  Text of the conversation will appear on the Google Nest Hub smart display to verify the translation. Not only does this relay to the traveler that his or her business is valued and appreciated, but it starts the stay out on the right foot.

Here are 4 ways that the Google Assistant’s interpreter mode will improve guests’ perceptions of your hotel, boosting satisfaction and loyalty.

Attracting New Travelers

Online consumer reviews are a must in today’s marketplace. Nearly everyone seeks out customer reviews before making a buying or booking decision. If you want to know if a hotel is foreigner friendly, just “Google it.” By reading guest comments, it will be easy for international travelers to determine if they want to stay at your hotel or not. Guests love the service, and it reflects in their customer satisfaction scores and online reviews. The more positive reviews from guests who loved their stay because they didn’t encounter frustrating language barriers, the more likely the hotel will grab the attention of other travelers who speak a foreign language.

Raising Service Levels

Adding the Google Assistant’s interpreter mode will generate good will by showing guests from a foreign market that you value their business and that the hotel is going the extra mile to ensure an exceptional stay experience. There is no better way to personalize a stay than to enable guests to speak requests in their own voices and with their own colloquialisms and accents and hear their requests conveyed clearly.

Ensuring Consistency

Consistency of service across the hotel enterprise is important, especially if you fly the flag of a global hotel brand. Placing a Google Nest Hub with the Google Assistant’s interpreter mode at all properties within the portfolio ensures that consistency and it communicates to travelers that no matter which hotels they visit within the chain, they are guaranteed a frictionless stay due to the provided translation technology.

Motivating Employees

Happy employees mean happy guests, and happy guests spend more money. By giving hotel staff tools that will make it easier for them to do their jobs, it will ultimately increase guest satisfaction and drive revenues. If your hotel has a significant number of employees who only speak one language, adding the Google Assistant’s interpreter mode will enable staff to do their jobs better. It will boost productivity, eliminate miscommunications, and improve morale.

When guests have an unpleasant stay because they feel their needs aren’t met or the language barrier causes too much confusion and frustration, the hotel can expect to lose business. The Google Assistant’s  interpreter mode on the Google Nest Hub, provisioned and managed by Volara, is a smart way of doing business.  Not only will it make guests happy by enabling them to request onsite services in their own language, it will reap intangible returns from positive reviews and happy employees, resulting in an improved bottom line.

David Berger is the Founder and CEO of Volara, the voice hub for the hospitality industry. Volara’s conversation management software and secure integrations hub turns the leading consumer smart speakers and natural language processing platforms into a hotel business tool.  Volara is building voice interfaces for leading hotel technologies, while providing hotels the software to manage conversations with their guests at scale. Volara is the Official and Exclusive Partner of Marriott for pilots of voice technologies.  It is also developing voice-based solutions for leading brands like Viceroy, Melia, Two Roads, and more.

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New this year was a “Travel & Tourism” educational track that highlighted how smarter and safer technologies are transforming the travel and tourism industries. A technology that remained in the spotlight during the three-session program was voice – such as the in-room solution atop Amazon Alexa powered by Volara that enables hotel guests to request services on voice command in the privacy of their rooms or the newly launched 29 language translation tool for hotel front and concierge desks known as the Google Assistant’s interpreter mode.

Both solutions improve guest engagement and mitigate the challenges many travelers face when at a hotel. Removing friction from the hotel guest experience with voice technology has the potential to redefine hospitality.

“Today’s travelers expect and demand the same mobility and connectivity they enjoy every day along every step of a journey,” said Dorothy Creamer, CES Travel & Tourism Session Moderator and Editor of Hospitality Technology. “As voice becomes the preferred method for guests to request service and information in their daily lives, travel providers will need to follow suit and use voice as a primary platform to remove friction from experiences. Empowering staff with voice-enabled devices will also increase efficiency resulting in happier guests and staff.”

As Creamer noted, voice technology solves a problem that has taunted the travel industry for years: Friction.

The three sessions of the Travel and Tourism educational track highlighted the following:

• “AI and VR in Travel” discussed how travel companies are using voice assistants to answer travelers’ questions and stay competitive. The announcement that Viceroy Hotel Group – after three full hotel deployments – is going ‘all in’ preceded CES and brought this to life.
• “The Travel Experience of the Future” looked at how technology – including voice assistants – are leading advancements and disruption in the travel industry. The session explored how hotels, airports and cruise lines are leveraging this technology to enhance the guest experience. The simultaneous announcement from American Airlines that they’ve adopted the Google Assistant’s interpreter mode re-emphasized the points made in this session
• “Smart Tourism” focused on how technologies – including automated voice – are assisting decision-makers in enhancing efficiency, sustainability and the user experience. The improved understanding of travelers needs – resulting from increased communication with them and a data-driven understanding of those communications when voice assistants serve as an intermediary – crystallized this session.

“Named the ‘Best Voice Activated Tech Product of 2020’ by HotelTechReport last week, we were especially thrilled to see voice technologies taking center stage at CES 2020,” said David Berger, Volara CEO. “By adding Volara-powered voice assistants in hotel rooms, as well as now at front desks and concierge stands, we are enabling operators to reduce friction in guest service – extending a familiar on command home experience to the hotel environment. We’ve spent the past four years developing conversation-management software that improves the accuracy of interactions while ensuring hotel guest privacy so travelers can have immersive, interactive and memorable experiences without friction. Central to this strategy has been collaborations with the leading natural language processing platforms that guests know and love from their homes, cars, and phones to thrive in these unique commercial environments. We believe on command is the new on demand in hospitality, and we are eager to see what the future holds for this application.”

CES® 2020 is the world’s largest and most influential tech event, where the entire technology ecosystem gathers to conduct business, launch products, build brands and partner to solve some of the world’s most challenging issues. More than 4,500 exhibitors launched nearly 20,000 new transformative tech products to more than 170,000 attendees January 7 to 10, encompassing 5G connectivity, artificial intelligence, augmented and virtual reality, smart cities and resilience, sports, robotics and more. CES 2020 featured new and expanded exhibit areas, 300 conference sessions with 1,100 speakers, and more than 1,200 startups from 45-plus countries.

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Messaging has quickly become the preferred channel of communication for customer service in hospitality, and this has not gone unrecognized amongst Whistle’s valued partners and customers. Hotels that have been quick to adopt a messaging solution have experienced a positive impact in their operations along with a huge competitive advantage.

“Great customer service and operational efficiency is a key differentiator for our customer base of quality hotel and lodging professionals,” said Christopher Hovanessian, Whistle cofounder and CEO. “Whistle continues to boost customer service ratings and streamline internal procedures like none other. Hotels can remedy routine customer issues very quickly, freeing up hotel employees to focus on more complex customer service requests, thereby delivering exceptional customer service and building brand loyalty.”

With Whistle, hoteliers experience the best flexibility with available integrations, along with more key functionalities including team collaboration, Artificial Intelligence, review collection, and endless automation.

Read what hotels using Whistle are saying on HotelTechReport:

“What I like the most about Whistle is the convenience of having a messaging system to get a hold of our team without the hassle of using loud radios or running around to find them. Whistle makes getting our messages across so effortless” – Hotel Agent in Phoenix.

“Whistle has really put the guests stay in the palm of their hand! It is really easy to reach out to the guest and have them respond on their time and at their leisure. I also love the team member chat feature. I can message a manager to the front desk without the guest ever knowing!” – Hotel Agent in Helena.

“Whistle has been a great addition to our Operation Drive Guest Satisfaction. It’s given our guests more freedom with a platform they are comfortable using to ask questions, present problems that can be rectified before departure, and even after departure to allow for questions to be asked. Overall a super helpful tool that’s really driven positive results.” – General Manager in Mississauga.

The HotelTechAwards (produced by Hotel Tech Report) announced the year’s top rated hotel software companies and tech products based on thousands of hotelier ratings and other key data-points. During the HotelTechAwards hoteliers from the world’s leading hotel companies across 100+ countries review the top tech products used at their hotels to increase operating efficiency, drive revenue and improve the guest experience. This data is used to identify the best hotel tech products and organizations.

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“We’re pleased to have been selected by Oaklawn as they embark on this expansion into hospitality,” said INTELITY SVP of Sales, Benjamin Keller. “After a thorough and highly competitive selection process including multiple customer references, technical reviews, and site visits, we’re ecstatic to have earned their business. Our existing customer base is our biggest asset and we’re excited to be welcoming Oaklawn to the INTELITY family.”

Founded in 1904, Oaklawn Racing Casino Resort has a rich racing history and also offers non-stop casino action year-round. It is the #1 tourist attraction in Arkansas and is home to The Racing Festival of the South and, most notably, the annual $1 million Arkansas Derby. Oaklawn regularly ranks among the top five Thoroughbred racetracks in North America in purse structure and attendance.

“We are excited about this new chapter for Oaklawn,” said Wayne Smith, Oaklawn Racing Casino Resort’s General Manager. “As we invest in building our new luxury hotel, implementing the right technology is a top priority. INTELITY offers solutions that will help us provide an enhanced experience and elevated service features that will help us exceed the expectations of our guests.”

Oaklawn will use INTELITY’s award-winning platform to create a frictionless guest experience across the property. Guests will have access to a fully branded mobile app, with mobile check-in and mobile key, the ability to request services and amenities, book reservations, view current promotions and communicate with staff. The new hotel will feature in-room tablets in every guest room and suite, which function as a digital compendium, offer access to all the property’s services, in-room dining, hotel promotions, events and retail offerings, and much more. Oaklawn will also offer tablets in public areas to provide guests with access to rich property and local information.

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