COVID-19 has shifted the world forever, including nearly every facet of the hospitality industry. As a virus most easily avoided through strict social distancing, COVID-19 has created countless unique challenges for hotel safety. While these challenges are daunting, the hospitality industry has emphatically responded.
Even before the pandemic, hotel technology catered towards efficient travel and hospitality; fine-tuning the technologies already in place proved an effective way to handle these new needs. Beyond tweaks to existing tech, COVID-19 has also allowed for the creation of new strategies and innovation. This evolution has promoted a massive growth in positive guest experiences.
In a world where society has largely learned to live with the pandemic, Blueprint RF strives to help improve your hospitality services. This blog will explore the ways that hotels can use new and existing technology to both increase Covid safety and promote a positive guest experience.
Contactless Guest Experiences
After COVID-19, people want to avoid contact as much as possible. To counter high-contact areas such as door handles, hotels now orchestrate digital room keys through online check-ins, often via mobile device. Digital room keys allow guests to skip any face-to-face interactions with the front desk, and avoid physically touching objects as much as possible.
Moreover, these digital services have created smart rooms, allowing guests to not even have to touch thermostats and remote controls. These contactless services help guests avoid breeding grounds for germs, controlling their hotel experience through their own personal phone or tablet.
Increased Personal Safety
Even though they are hubs for gathering, most hotels are already designed to allow for seamless movement throughout a space. As such, even pre-pandemic hotel design allowed for resort navigation without much direct human-to-human interaction. Despite this built-in ease of navigation, COVID-19 created an entirely new world of standards for health safety.
Today, hospitality professionals understand they need to hit certain updated benchmarks. Recent technology allows for proper tracing and implementation of new protocols — including UV sanitizing of rooms and temperature scanning for employees to ensure both staff and guest safety.
Beyond hands-on sanitation, hotels can leverage social platforms and websites to communicate policies and standards to their upcoming guests. By providing and stressing the importance of personal safety, hotels actively promote a positive guest experience.
Seamless Visitor Connectivity
Another way to promote positive hotel guest experience and increase COVID safety is to ensure guest WiFi networks are as strong as possible. While essential to online streaming and other amenities, WiFi connectivity is even more important for messaging during COVID.
A powerful network allows for intuitive guest access to hotel information through email or online messaging, eliminating the hassle of alerting guests via phone or in-person interaction. Additionally, guests can easily access hotel websites on their personal devices to gain and search for additional information. Altogether, these solutions drastically cut down on visits to the front desk, increasing guest safety and improving their experience.
Digital Personalization
Travelers expect hotels to be a home away from home. Whether a hotel is simply providing a place to rest the night before an early flight, or curating an extravagant week-long stay at a beautiful resort— hotels are a place to be welcomed and put at ease. Further, COVID has restricted guests’ access to travel – both business and pleasure – thus increasing the need to make them feel welcomed and at home when they do have the opportunity to take a trip.
Digital personalization can increase feelings of being welcomed, making hotels feel like a guest’s home again. By utilizing hotel technology powered by a strong hotel WiFi network for digital personalization, hoteliers are able to foster an incredible experience for guests. Online guest profiles can capture things like guest birthdays, likes, and dislikes to customize messaging both during their stays and for future stays.
Expansive Guest Automation
Making a guest’s experience as smooth as possible is the ultimate priority for any hospitality professional. Guest automation does just that, streamlining guests processes and eliminating potential COVID risk factors.
Hotel technology can increase automation in a variety of ways. When guests check out and digital room keys are disabled, housekeeping staff can be alerted to clean and sanitize rooms immediately. With speedy room turnaround, incoming guests can access their rooms incredibly fast and feel safe staying there.
Automation can also be used by guests to book dining reservations, shuttle pickups, and other amenities available at the hotel, eliminating the need for guests to pick up an in-room phone or visit the front desk. This reduces the number of face-to-face interactions with staff, and keeps those interactions down to an as-needed basis. Once again, the risk of COVID plummets and guest experience improves.
Providing Powerful WiFI Supporting Hotel Technology
New hotel technology sweeps across hotel needs, from booking a stay to guest check-out. As diverse as these solutions are, they all have one thing in common: each requires an incredibly reliable WiFi network to maintain their efficiency.
BlueprintRF’s DG2 solution delivers 40 gigabits per interface, perfect for any number of the circumstances explored above. Contact us today to learn how our network can power the latest and greatest in technology to help your hotel deliver an unmatched guest experience.
