Hong Kong Hotel Establishes New Benchmark in Hotel TV Experience
Exterity, a provider of IP video, digital signage and guest experience technologies, announced that the Alva Hotel by Royal, a stylish and contemporary resort in the riverside area of Shatin in Hong Kong, has deployed Exterity’s ArtioGuest software to provide its international clientele with an intuitive, high-tech in-room experience.
Hotel Alva wanted to deploy a cutting-edge digital signage and in-room infotainment system that enables a seamless experience across different screens throughout the resort – to establish a new benchmark in hotel TV experience. The hotel’s senior management wanted to implement a user experience that matched the modernity of Hotel Alva, and so contacted SmarTone, a leading Hong Kong telecommunications company, to develop a unique guest entertainment and communications solution across the resort, including guest rooms.
Daniel Leung, General Manager of Enterprise Solution Development at SmarTone said: “Our brief was to make sure that they had a reliable, robust and flexible solution that could deliver the better-than-home experience they wanted to create. Therefore, our natural choice was Exterity, which has built a strong reputation in the hospitality world while still being cost-effective and backed by excellent local management, support team and distributor Comm-Tec.”
SmarTone deployed a fully featured Exterity in-room guest entertainment solution to over 700 Sony BRAVIA SmartTVs, as well as integrating digital signage across the hotel’s public areas – leveraging the Exterity system’s ability to stream content and signage directly to SmartTVs. Using Exterity’s ArtioGuest software, each room has a simple and easy-to-use interface that allows a range of advanced features accessed from either the SmartTV or via an iPad in each guestroom. These include numerous local and premium TV channels, available in up to 4K quality. The Exterity solution is also used to group different channels together for viewing in various public areas.
“Today’s modern travelers are looking for hoteliers to provide an in-room experience that’s superior to what they have at home,” said Jamie Hind, Regional Director, Asia Pacific at Exterity. “Hotel Alva is a great example of a hotel offering an experience that exceeds guests’ expectations by using a fully customizable portal that seamlessly delivers live TV, VoD and an array of complementary services to deliver next-generation customer experiences.”
The Exterity system enables a continuous TV experience across multiple endpoints and personalized video entertainment through Apple iOS mirroring and Chromecast video casting features from guests’ own mobile devices. Other advanced guest capabilities include several self-service options to ease check-in, check-out directly from the TVs and the ability for guests to use their own mobile device as a room key – all of which will be welcomed in a post-Coronavirus era.
In Leung’s view, the project sets a “new defacto standard” in hotel TV experience:“The Exterity platforms have proven exceptionally reliable, while the software applications offer a great deal of flexibility, which has allowed us to deliver one of the most forward-thinking and technologically innovative properties in the region.”