3 Ways Facial Recognition Tech Can Generate Revenue for Hotels

Face recognition is one of many rapidly growing industries that seem to have entered the public spotlight. What once was science fiction is now readily available on people’s smartphones. However, the uses for face recognition don’t stop there. Some face recognition providers are now partnering with companies in the hospitality industry to use their technology in many ways, such as quick check-ins and more robust security. These use cases, along with many others, can serve as the catalyst for hotels to increase their revenue through the use of advanced technologies like face recognition.

This article from Ever AI describes three ways facial recognition technology can help generate revenue for hotels today:

1. Creating a more personalized customer experience

At its core, face recognition is an organizational tool. It allows for information to be associated with a specific person's face and is able to access that information when it detects that person’s presence. If guests give their consent, face recognition can provide hotel patrons with a more personalized experience, especially for return guests.

The most obvious information that can be leveraged through face recognition is a guest’s name. Rather than asking who they are at entrance, hotel staff and front desk attendants can greet guests by their given name, which not only creates a streamlined check-in process but also makes guests feel more at home. This also allows for personal preferences or interests to be saved. Does the guest prefer a room with a view? Do they want to know the pool hours for their kids? Do they usually require an early wake-up call? Anything that hotel staff members can do to make the guest’s stay better and more personalized can be stored for them before the guest has to ask.

Face recognition also helps to create a more frictionless guest experience. If guests were to provide photos of themselves beforehand, they can automatically be checked-in when cameras detect that they’ve entered the hotel. High-quality face recognition can also detect emotion, enabling hotels to monitor and detect guests who are not enjoying their stay and take the appropriate measures to rectify this.

All of this contributes to an enhanced customer experience. Guests will be encouraged to repeat their stay the more comfortable they feel with the hotel. Why would they want to stay at a different hotel when one remembers all of their personal preferences and information?

2. Augmenting a hotel's customer database

A hotel’s customer database is one if its most valuable assets. That said, collecting this information has historically been a challenge. A hotel’s ability to gather and analyze customer data is crucial in order to correctly market and make changes to their services. A large part of this data collection includes understanding the demographic breakdown of guests. It is imperative that a hotel understand how best to market to their target audiences, and with face recognition, this process can be implemented instantaneously.

Many face recognition technologies have the ability to do more than just recognize faces. If a guest opts into a hotel's face recognition services, they would be required to send in a photo of themselves as part of the registration process. Using this photo, hotels can leverage face recognition technology to gather information about the guests’ gender, ethnicity and even their age. With the ability to instantly pull this data from photos, hotels can capture a more detailed customer database.

Detecting certain guests’ demographics also allows hotels to gather more detailed data about certain demographics and the use of a hotel’s services. By passively gathering data about which guests use certain facilities, a hotel can better market their services. For example, if data shows that the majority of people who use a hotel’s swimming pool are 30-40 year-old Hispanic males, then that hotel could then alter their marketing strategy towards that group.

3. Increased Security

Security is important in order to maintain a hotel’s revenue; if guests feel that either they or their belongings are unsafe, it's almost guaranteed that they won’t be returning anytime soon. On the other hand, guests will be more attracted to a hotel if they know they and their belongings will be secure. However, using face recognition, it is possible to create and implement some of the greatest security systems in the world. Any crime caught on camera can lead to perpetrator identification, especially if their face is already in the hotel’s database.

More than just monitoring, face recognition can also aid in the prevention of crime. Any troublemaker’s face that is caught on camera can be saved into a hotel’s database or sent straight to police. Face recognition technology can house records of undesirable guests, or people who have a history of trouble, and alert staff if they are detected on the premises.

Face recognition can also be used to monitor for small children who appear to be alone. If a child was detected alone or in a state of distress, hotel staff can easily send an alert to the child’s family or notify staff. Likewise, if a child is reported missing, it is easy to detect if they are within hotel boundaries using face recognition.

The hospitality industry is a competitive space where every advantage over competitors makes a difference. Using and investing in technology has been a method for hotels to gain an edge over competitors for ages, and face recognition is one of the technologies many organizations have invested in to not only increase revenue, but also enhance guest experiences in meaningful, memorable ways.