Guests are devouring hotel bandwidth with increasing demands, data-hog applications, and multiple devices per room, leaving hoteliers with the choice between satisfying guests and controlling costs.
Hotels continue to have their communications networks shaped by the preferences of today’s always-connected guest and the growing dependency of millennial travelers on their personal devices.
Seamless connection to the Internet and the guest’s most popular data/video applications are key, to ensure guest satisfaction and instill loyalty by delivering a simplified connectivity experience. In a recent study 52% of hoteliers put increasing guest engagement and loyalty as their top priority in 2017.* So the pressure is on to deliver on-demand bandwidth and lots of it.
There are several strategies that can help hoteliers take control back while still delivering exceptional guest experience.
- Tiered Service – Enforcing pay to play. True, the standard for hotels is to offer tiered service. It’s even more relevant today with the increasing demand on bandwidth. Now the issue transitions to enforcement of the tiers to protect your property from over consumption due to live, real-time usage of high-bandwidth video streaming applications such as viewing Netflix or Hulu. Most don’t have the tools to enforce their tiered pricing. Hotel network administrators require some level of bandwidth allocation functionality in their toolkit (such as detailed below) to optimize revenue from a tiered service strategy, otherwise – incremental revenue is lost.
- Data Analysis – Know your guests. The key to balancing the right level of network capacity and delivering a great guest connectivity experience is to understand your guest usage patterns and trends. By knowing trends and preferences, your IT team and network partner will be able to anticipate your peak periods and ensure performance. Understanding these metrics also gives you insight into your guest behaviors, preferences, and overall profiles to support marketing and potentially monetize this data with messaging or promotional broadcasts.
- Bandwidth Orchestration – Optimize current circuits. Today hotels can easily control and manage property-wide bandwidth, utilizing existing circuits in concert with one another for optimal performance. Using a process enabled by the latest Software Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) management, hotels can control ever-increasing bandwidth costs, while meeting guest expectations at the same time. SD-WAN helps hoteliers get the most value from existing communications lines by consolidating bandwidth (and costs) and routing traffic over the best available circuit.
While it may seem like the guest is winning the battle on bandwidth, hotels can win the war. With proactive planning, tools, and the right partner, delivering quality guest connectivity can be a win-win.
*Hotel Technology’s 2017 Lodging Technology Study shows the areas that hotels will focus their technology spend.
