The Electronic Guestroom

Here is my second entry.

Name of the author: Jon Inge
Title of the article: “The Electronic Guestroom”
Magazine name: Hospitality Upgrade
Issue: 3/1/2006
URL of the article: http://www.hospitalityupgrade.com/_magazine/magazine_Detail.asp?ID=56


Summary:

This article focuses on the issue of electronic guestroom in the hospitality industry. Since an increasingly sophisticated technology people have at home, it is no doubt that they have relatively higher expectations of the guestroom in hotels. However, with a fast pace of change of technology, it is hard to predict and plan for the demand in the future. Two key answers that authors mentioned about are Internet Protocol-based standards and central systems management. The purposes of using it are producing more cohesive system flexibly and efficiently at an affordable price. There are five general categories for the guestroom systems: The first category is the audio-visual entertainment which included flat-panel displays with connectors to hook in guest’s personal music and video players, 5.1 theater-style surround-sound set-up, a variety of program channel and pay-per-view digital movies. Second is the guest service which included mini-bars that monitored by central management systems, in-room safes and electronic do-not-disturb/maid service indicators. The third category is communication which included voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phones and wired, wireless or both high-speed 802.11 Internet access (HSIA). Forth is security and environment control which included intelligent thermostats and electronic locks by using biometric controls, radio-frequency ID (RFID) keycards or smart cards. Lastly, infrastructure simply means hotel networks. The development of a separate all-in-one guestroom control unit will be a potential outcome in the future.

My Reflection:

It is true that guestroom technology has become a critical issue for hospitality industry. The goal is as functional as possible at an affordable price. In my opinion, all five categories which are mentioned above are highly demandable. However, the high-speed Internet access (HSIA) is definitely essential. Nowadays, wired connection is not enough. Many hotels are providing wireless access in order to achieve larger range of coverage since many more access points are needed. Streaming programming from inexpensive online movie libraries becomes very common by combining HSIA with flat-panel displays. It can even extend the usefulness by integrating with other hotel systems. Guests can access the hotel information to make dining reservations, order room service, access concierge services, enter wakeup calls, check their meeting agenda and room location, view diagrams of the resort layout and focus on specific attractions, view folio information and check out and so on. However, this flexibility does have the drawback. The obvious one is causing a data traffic because of the heavy usage. To solve this problem, hotels can limit their consumption by providing free HSIA for reasonable usage such as e-mail and general surfing but charging for continuous heavy usage for streaming video. With the good use of information technology, it will be a multiple benefits to all of us.