Technology comes to all aspects of human lives, and hotels are no exception. In their attempts to keep in touch with newest trends and make guests even more satisfied, hotel companies restlessly add new features and services. Hilton Worldwide introduced the new hotel guest room prototype that will soon appear in the company’s hotels around the world. Connected Room is a digitally enhanced room with precise adjustment via Hilton Honors application.
The new digital platform makes it easy to integrate new solutions to hotels. Connected Room allows guests to use the digital key technology that is already available in more than 5,100 properties worldwide. The remaining hotels will get this feature installed this year. Besides that, guests will be able to control a number of things, such as lighting or room temperature. More precise adjustment is also available for instance, guests can synch lighting and heating or cooling and program a personal schedule. New smart TVs also allow programming via smartphone, without any need for a remote control.
The upgrade concerns not only guest rooms. Hotels will get a special dashboard that displays crucial information in a convenient way. The hotel staff will see energy consumption, room maintenance needs, connected devices in the hotel’s network, and many other housekeeping functions. At the moment, the new system undergoes a series of tests at the Hilton Garden Inn hotel in Memphis. The choice of the property is not random as a Hilton development team lives in that area. The global launch is scheduled for 2018.
In the long run, Connected Room will offer expanded functionality to its guests, including voice commands to control the room and enable simple access to different content, fast upload of artworks or photos that will be displayed during their stay, and many other fully customizable features that will be accessible via the Hilton Honors application. This app is just a part of the global innovation program that is currently under development. In future, it will provide guests with automated real-time translation into numerous languages, an automated noise reduction system, and even a cocktail mixing device.
Hilton also explores new technologies that are yet hard to apply in hotels, such as 3D printing. Another big trend of our days, VR, has found application in realistic prototypes of new hotel brands, Canopy and Tru. All hotel owners can use VR goggles to see how hotels look like, see a typical room, floor plan, look at lobbies, and more. If future, Hilton plans to add VR technologies to restaurants and public spaces in hotels.