Connected & Intelligent

More than half (54%) of hotels are upgrading or changing WiFi suppliers. What trends or enterprise needs are driving the need for robust hotel networks?

JADY WEST: There are expected to be more than 64B IoT devices worldwide by 2025. Take this statistic, cascade it to hotels and then to hotel rooms. In the coming IoT world almost every item a hotel guest touches will be connected to some network that will need latency free high capacity connectivity. In addition, in the era of hyper-personalization, every connected device will produce large amounts of data that the network, with the help of AI, will need to to make decisions on and serve up a personalized answer to guest queries. A subpar network could be the difference between a guest having an “okay” experience to a “wow” one simply because of the speed with which devices respond.

Improving analytics remains a top strategic objective for hotels. How can technology -- and WiFi and hotel networks specifically -- be used to improve data strategies from pre-stay to post-check-out?

WEST: Hoteliers need to move to master guest experience metrics versus network performance metrics. The data that a property’s WiFi network produces should inform guest experience metrics that drive many aspects of a hotel’s operations, including and maybe more importantly than the marketing department. A hotel’s marketing team can then integrate the data from metrics to craft better guest experience strategies. An example of a guest experience metric may be measuring how long after check-in does a guest log on to a property’s network and how fast does the property’s WiFi landing page deliver relevant content to the guest.