The hotel industry is entering an era of unprecedented change," says Jérôme Destors, director of hotel IT at Amadeus. "Change requires bold actions... requires hoteliers to think in different ways. We no longer expect to continue as we were." So what can we expect? Coathangers that come off the rail? Room service breakfasts at a reasonable price? Emerging trends, fast-evolving technology, and the industry professionals questioned by Fast Future Research for a recent Amadeus report, Hotels 2020, all suggest something even more dramatic.
REVOLUTION: CUSTOMERS UNITE AND RULE
Communication between guests used to be limited to a glance of commiseration in the check-in queue. Now, we're united as packs through social media and keen to share our experiences — instantly — with thousands. We have power and we know how to use it. Room rates are under attack and the reverse auction is becoming more common. A big enough group of people with a shared objective - ten couples, say, looking for boutique hotels in Barcelona for a spring break - through sites and tweets can come together as a temporary group with enough leverage to offer their business to the hotel that can give them the best price.
Reputations are being made and broken online. Social media sites already hold more information on some hotels than the hotels' own websites — and they're persuasive: six out of ten people change their travel plans after consulting them. The new wave of geo-social sites, such as FourSquare and Dopplr, will take things further, giving real time information, reviews, discounts and offers relevant to any location — useful collective intelligence that anyone with a smartphone can tap into. Starting with a user base of 550 million, the new arrival, Facebook Places, is set to dominate.
Hotels that don't play the game will be invisible in this digital reality (or possibly represented by an unfavourable review). Hotels that do will be drawn into appeasing guests and undercutting offers from neighbouring properties — not seasonally, but by the hour.
WHAT DO WE WANT? CHOICE
"There's been an explosion of personalisation," says Rohit Talwar, chief executive of Fast Future. "With an iPhone app, people can completely customise their experience. And now they're asking why they can't have the same control in customising a hotel experience."
Instead of taking the hotel package, it seems we'll be presented with an all-new 'consumer-led spectrum of choice'. And advances in technology suggest there will be much to choose from. We'll be able to customise décor and audiovisual entertainment and select how we check in — via our smartphones or biometrics, at an airport style self-check-in kiosk... or by forming an orderly queue at reception.
Embedded intelligence at 'touch points' (anywhere we make a transaction or select an option) will record our preferences and use data analysis to extrapolate information from what we did, used or bought in order to refine and enhance the service we are offered on subsequent visits.
Today we're impressed that the Sofitel Manila Plaza has virtual trainers on its gym equipment capable of giving guests a personalised workout. In ten years we'll be complaining that the lighting and fragrance in our rooms hasn't been set to our preferences and the fruit selection's wrong.
NEW CUSTOMERS — OR, RATHER, OLDER ONES
While recognising that we are all individuals with our individual needs, hotels will need to adapt to accommodate two increasingly important and not mutually exclusive market segments — the older traveller and the Asian traveller. The ageing population in Europe and the US is richer, healthier and more likely to travel than ever before. The over-60s, on average less active and staying longer, will be looking for health, education, culture-rich packages and entertainment. Hotels will need to provide onsite medical facilities, priority rooms located by lifts, adapted bathrooms and more easily readable signs. And it will have an impact on staffing — guests will require more attention and support.
While recruiting, hotels would be advised to opt for staff with language skills. Asia will account for one third of global travel spend by 2020 [Travel Gold Rush 2020]. China represents a huge market, the needs of which are very little understood, except for the fact that the Chinese are used to paying a lot less for a room and smoke under No Smoking signs. Hotels attempting to expand in China in the next decade will be up against an explosion of Chinese budget brands, including Jin Jiang Inn, Home Inn and 7 Days Inn. Chinese hotel brands will provide competition internationally as well, not just in the budget sector but also at the luxury end.
BEDROOMS OF THE FUTURE
Once more properties make it possible to go online and take virtual tours before booking, we'll start to be more specific about the rooms we select — from size, floor and corridor position to views and layout. And there will be more hypoallergenic rooms. Hyatt, Sheraton and Wyndham are among the dozens of chains that have tapped a rich vein by pandering to guests with allergies and neuroses and adding Pure Rooms, in which (claims Pure) 99 per cent of pollutants have been filtered from the air. The Hilton, Chicago, has gone the whole hog with Enviro-Rooms stripped of carpets and curtains and anti-microbial agents applied to knobs and handles.
Having (finally) decided on a room, we can expect a pre-check-in menu of beds, pillows and linen available at a range of different prices. If we've stayed before, the temperature, lighting and entertainment channels in the room will be set to our preferences. If not, we can sort it all out through the central control. We'll configure the artwork (contained within digital frames) and customise the wallpaper, thanks to widespread use of intelligent materials.
SCIENCE FICTION BECOMES FACT
Every report into the future of hotels has confidently predicted a science-fiction style makeover. This time it's looking more likely.
Three-quarters of Hotel 2020 survey respondents expected augmented reality — where layers of digital information pop up over the things around us — to become widespread. To see that via phones and cameras and pop-up screens is one thing, but researchers are perfecting lenses with WiFi LEDs allowing data to be superimposed on our visual field. Add in facial recognition and hotel staff can run security checks on everyone that passes through the lobby. Brain control headsets — so we can interact with hotel facilities just by thinking — and 3D touchable holograms also "seem far-fetched but aren't," according to Talwar.
Hotels will be expected — by their Generation Y customers at least — to keep pace with technology and to provide a smart environment and an increasingly rich, immersive experience. But for hotel brands, which need to evaluate the merits of each new technology before installing and rolling it out, this will continue to prove a major challenge.
For example, do they install 3D TVs or should they wait for the inevitable 4D with smell and touch capabilities? Or for the holographic TVs with 3D images that pop up from a tabletop projector? The newfangled go boards and surface interactive screens installed recently at a few Marriott and InterContinental hotels to display local information in response to touch (and, in the case of the latter, gestures) don't have a huge wow factor for guests who own iPads and Wiis.
STARS GET A SHAKE-UP
Judging by the 35 million reviews on TripAdvisor, people seem to think it is service and ambience that make a hotel special, not infrastructure. Under such pressure, the long-established star classification systems might finally morph into something that better reflects the customer experience. Staff would be required continually to throw themselves into maximising guest satisfaction to ensure a hotel maintains its rating. Israel has eschewed the whole star system altogether, and now Jordan has introduced rankings based on the guest's perspective.
Interestingly, there is also talk of mixed-tier hotels, where different categories of hotel from budget to luxury are co-located at one location and share leisure facilities.
SUSTAINED INTEREST IN SUSTAINABILITY
In the survey, 83 per cent agreed that by 2020 'environmental considerations will play an increasing role in the choice of business and leisure hotels'. This is generally what industry professionals predict, but with the next generation of customers justifiably snippy about baby boomers using so much of the earth's resources, hotels have to take action to win their trade.
The hotel industry ranks low on environmental awareness, according to the UK's Environment Agency, but things are changing. London's newly reopened, famously traditional Savoy Hotel has the world's first Green Butler who'll not only unpack for you but recommend eco restaurants, eco bars and eco retail outlets. More than £2.4m has been invested in environmental technologies including a combined heat and power (CHP) plant cutting the hotel's reliance on the national grid by half and a system which reclaims the heat from kitchen appliances to provide hot water.
Starwood Hotels and Resorts turned to Conservation International for advice in setting a goal to cut water consumption by 20 per cent, and energy use in each of its 1,000 properties by 30 per cent by 2020. And it's a hotel, the Crowne Plaza Copenhagen Towers, that boasts the largest building-integrated solar panel system in northern Europe.
The hotel industry demand for environmentally sound building materials is a great incentive for more investment in nanotechnology and biotechnology, and the invention of products that will eventually be available in our own homes, such as solar light harvesting wallpapers and self-cleaning bathrooms. The demand for locally and organically produced sustainable food is prompting hotels to explore the possibility of vertical farming, where crops would be grown hydroponically, behind glass-walled floors on top of the building.
ONLY PAY FOR WHAT YOU USE
The old adage 'waste not, want not' will figure large in hotel construction, furnishing and staffing decisions. Instead of constructing and maintaining buildings that have only occasional use, hoteliers will take advantage of modular construction, pods and flat-packs to add and remove space as required. This might be tricky on a daily basis, but we can expect to it work seasonally. It's a sign of the times that destination design firm WATG won first place in the Radical Innovation in Hospitality competition for Mosaic, a system of collapsible geometric-shaped prisms complete with fixtures, fittings and self-contained energy, plumbing and lighting.
There's the potential for Northern European beach hotels to be constructed entirely of prisms and pods, and to relocate to the tropics for winter. We can also expect the emergence of hotel properties that have no specific location but are transported around the world serving as branded pop-up accommodation for festivals and sporting events.
Waste is also being eliminated within hotels. Guest movement and pressure sensors will show which areas of hotels have the highest and lowest traffic, and allow managers to use spaces more economically. There will be a general reduction in the amount of stuff that's placed in the rooms. "I go in and automatically count the things I won't use," says Talwar. "Rather than say 'here's my product,' hotels should be providing customers with a basic shell that could be customised to meet their needs."
Soon, it seems, guests won't have to pay for things they don't use. That includes their empty room. Hotels are expected to shift from charging for rooms from a fixed check-in time, to charging for a 24-hour period from the time the guest checks in.
So things look good for tomorrow's guests, but not quite so good for staff. Robots are cheap, efficient, multilingual and rolling off the production line. Hotels may begin using intelligent robots to clean and reset rooms by 2020, and, before long, to act as bellman and concierge.
SIMPLY AWE-INSPIRING
All the data mining, collaboration and increase of choice should result in hotels that meet our expectations, but there will always be room for hotels that surpass them. The rising number of high-net-worth individuals will seek out awe-inspiring hotels for new experiences. This doesn't equate to traditional luxury. In an age of total connectivity, getting off the grid will be highly desirable. In the quest for a USP, hotels will pick odd locations, from cliff-side to helicopter access-only peaks, and the idea of an airship-style floating hotel is still being, er, floated. Splendid isolation will be offered at a premium for what's been termed the No-Frills Affluent.
Hotels also need to coax in the Stay-Home-Gamers. It's anticipated that brands focused on younger markets will form partnerships with home entertainment companies to offer guests exclusive previews of the latest gaming technology.
"There's a need for hotels to be innovative," says Jerome Déstôrs, "and there's potential for them to act as living laboratories for the development and testing of new ideas." This could be in the build. China's hotel architects, such as Zhu Pei, who gave Beijing's Hotel Kapok walls that glow like a Chinese lantern, and W Hotels' support for new designers, create an impact through fresh design. But it could also be taking and reflecting the biggest, brightest and best ideas that each generation has to offer.
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