3 hospitality tech predictions for the new era of travel

13-09-22

The future of hospitality is an exciting one for resorts, hotels and restaurants, as connected experiences can drive both customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Today’s travelers have exposure to thousands of choices when it comes to selecting their experiences: hotels, activities and entertainment and their restaurant and food options. To discover their destinations, travelers don’t have to be physically there. They want to be there virtually both before and after their trips. What’s more, they have a better sense of what is available, desiring a more constant taste of it through their smart phones, their connected TVs and laptops.

In the ever-competitive world of travel and hospitality, companies are eager to find a new recipe for success – one that perfectly strikes the balance between the digital and physical worlds, empowers employees to provide extra-human service in a high-tech environment, and deliver the total guest experience at whatever stage a visit is in. With that said, improved connectivity, the use of cognitive computing with AI and even emerging digital worlds inside the metaverse are shaping the future of hospitality.  

Venues will serve up presence-free options

Over the past two years, “contactless” options were adopted by hotels and resorts during the pandemic, including digital check-ins and ticketing, ordering via apps and mobile and biometric payment methods, which are all here to stay. 

In the future, hospitality companies will be able to welcome guests that are not present at their venue at all, using innovative technologies such as augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR) and even virtual communities found in the metaverse to offer presence-free experiences to guests anywhere in the world.

Guest experiences will start well before they arrive and continue long after they leave. Getting into a vacation well before arriving at the venue – described by Foresight Factory as “pretailtainment” – has become a key part of the extended guest experience. 

To this end, we are seeing more and more brands creating digital content to engage and convert potential guests during the research and exploration phase. Forget looking at photos or scanning the menu, in the future, guests will no longer do anything without first trying out the fully interactive, immersive digital option.

As the virtual experience becomes a non-negotiable precursor to the real event, companies will begin to offer more creative and personalized pretailtainment options. “Post-stay” services can also be integrated, rounding out the total guest experience. Beyond thank-you notes or token gifts, instead, guests will receive digital content that is tailor-made to help them relive specific moments from their stay or visit.

Hospitality companies will interpret and cater to how guests feel

Getting to know your customer, and providing more individualized services, is easier than ever. Thanks to a highly digital, expanded customer journey, as well as more advanced loyalty programs, hospitality venues now have access to a wealth of data that can be combined with AI technology to generate insights and create tailored experiences.

These insights can also help empower employees, equipping them with the information they need to provide top-quality, personalized service and pre-empt requests. As face-to-face interactions become fewer and farther between, giving staff what they need to provide “extra-human” service will help brands to stand out and make the total experience even more meaningful.

Hospitality companies will feed insights back to guests

As guests become both more concerned about making the right travel choices and are more empowered to do so with technology, hospitality venues must be ready to share data to help inform their decisions with respect to resource deployment and adjusting aspects of their venue to best meet the expectations during the customers stay.

Additionally, they must be prepared to offer more options that cater to the eco-, health- and ethics-conscious, or risk losing business to more forthcoming and considerate competitors.

Meeting these expectations requires making sense of collected data quickly and responding accordingly, which is why simply deploying Wi-Fi solutions for connectivity alone is no longer enough.

Hotels, resorts and restaurants should be outfitted with high-performing, secure, reliable and automated networks that can facilitate both current and coming digital innovations and deliver total guest experiences that continue to surprise and delight, meeting the demands of today and tomorrow.