Hotel Automation: Strategies & Benefits

Hotel automation means using a technological system to automate various repetitive tasks while streamlining operations, enhancing efficiency, and lowering costs simultaneously. This spectrum of tasks includes automating check-ins, housekeeping, inventory and room management, and a lot more. This has completely revolutionized the hospitality industry and is currently being done through cutting-edge software. It also has the potential to enhance revenues in a more competitive market while giving brands an advantage in terms of efficiency, lowering errors, and optimizing the allocation of resources.

10 Advantages of Hotel Automation Systems

Automation in hospitality industry offers multiple advantages, including the following:

·         Streamlined Operations

      From front desk automation and hotel room automation to check-ins and check-outs, all processes are streamlined to save time and lower errors alongside. Staff members can thus be freed up to focus more on high-value interactions with guests.

·         Lowering Costs

      Automation goes a long way towards lowering labor costs through more efficient procedures, while freeing up staff members for vital tasks. It may also lower energy consumption and help save on operational costs in turn. 

·         Boosting Guest Experiences

      An automated hotel can offer swifter and more efficient check-ins, check-outs, digital room keys, personalized communication, and more towards creating more convenient and smoother guest experiences.

·         Higher Efficiency

      Through the automation of repetitive hotel tasks, staff members can concentrate more on customer-focused activities and strategic tasks, enabling higher productivity and efficiency alike. 

·         Better Productivity

      Staff members can be more productive and stay on top of operations, without heavily getting into manual tasks, while dedicating more time towards customer service, personalization, recommendations, and value-added activities. 

·         Higher Revenues

      Hotel automation can enable brands to scale up revenues through targeted marketing, customized stays, up-selling, and optimized strategies for pricing based on extensive data analysis.

·         Enhanced Customer Loyalty

     Through fast, smooth, and custom experiences, automation helps greatly in terms of enabling hospitality brands to build better guest relationships. This may also drive repeat bookings and loyalty in turn. 

·         Lower Errors

      These systems can lower the potential for human errors across various tasks including inventory, reservations, billing, and management, thereby ensuring higher efficiency and accuracy alike.

·         Better Communication

      Hotels and serviced apartments can smoothly communicate with guests in an effective manner, via customized messaging, online platforms, automated alerts, and so on. This goes a long way towards enhancing guest engagement and satisfaction considerably.

·         Better Front Desk Operations

       Implementing front desk automation enables digital check-ins for more convenience along with advanced features like ID verification, fraud detection, credit card authorization, etc. This helps reduce staff workload while enabling guests to begin their stays sooner as well.  

There are some added benefits as well, including the following:

Ø  There are insights garnered through data analytics, gathering information regarding guest preferences, customer feedback, booking patterns, and more.

Ø  AI-based automation solutions integrate easily with the CRM/PMS to give you valuable insights likewise.

Ø  You can use them to identify suitable trends and scale up revenues with tailored marketing and optimized strategies for revenue management.

Ø  You can also keep a tab on customer feedback and preferences while taking action swiftly on various issues, which are alerted in real-time.

Ø  Your team can tackle them promptly and prevent them happening in the future.

Ø  Hotels and serviced apartments can also reduce the carbon footprint by ensuring smarter energy usage. Digitized communication lowers paper waste, while mobile key technology also eliminates plastic waste.

Ø  Virtual concierge and Chatbots can offer instant recommendations and support for queries, while acting fast in urgent scenarios. 24-7 availability is a major advantage and this helps guests check-in even during the wee hours.

Top Hotel Automation Systems

You’ll find that there are several popular hotel automation systems available, enabling streamlined operations and better customer experiences. Some of these leading systems include SmarDen mycloud Hospitality, Cloudbeds, Mews, Oracle, and Capterra, to name a few. These systems have features like smart room controls, centralized tracking, and integrated guest management, to name a few.

Another option is aPerfectStay, which is a cloud-based PMS (property management system) that is tailored for serviced apartments and hotels, enabling daily operation automation and better customer experiences alike. It also helps manage various tasks such as maintenance, reservations, housekeeping, billing, and also offers insights and reports for better decision-making.

Examples of Hotel Automation

There are several examples of automation in hospitality industry in terms of the areas covered. Some of them include:

·         Mobile check-ins and check-outs through mobile apps without the need for the front desk

·         Digital keys that guests can use on their smartphones to unlock rooms

·         Automated messaging systems or Chatbots for communicating with guests throughout the stay

·         Smart room systems where guests can control the temperature, lighting, and other room functions with voice assistants or smartphones

·         Automated housekeeping systems with robots and other technologies for maintenance and cleaning

·         Revenue management systems that work to automate optimized room pricing and allocation of inventory

·         Guests may use self-service kiosks for check-outs, check-ins, and other services

·         IoT integration with interconnected devices that take care of various functions driven by individual guest preferences, enabling targeted marketing, proactive maintenance, and lower usage of energy

Future of Hotel Automation

The future of hotel automation looks increasingly bright, particularly with more serviced apartments and hotels tapping into these technologies for revenue, customer loyalty, better operations, and many other benefits. Automation will continue to evolve across the market, with more usage of analytics to enhance customer experiences, while also finding more ways to integrate better with emerging and new technologies like augmented reality for improved guest engagement.

Some of the major trends include AI-based personalization, where technology can analyze data and predict preferences, while offering more tailored experiences (hyper-personalization). This will cover everything from room settings and dining recommendations to 24-7 virtual assistants and Chatbots. Contactless technologies like mobile check-ins and digital keys will be par for the course, along with automated service requests, smarter and IoT-backed rooms, and usage of AI and IoT for optimal energy consumption, tracking resource usage, and lowering the environmental footprint considerably. There could also be an increasing emphasis on data security and privacy along with using robots for various tasks.

AI-powered concierge and automated check-ins will also be big trends going forward. Solutions like aPerfectStay can thus be great options to harness the benefits of hotel automation across the industry in the future.