Digital Transformation at its best!

The Italian hotel story & what could've been

Imagine being a guest in a hotel where all the facilities revolve around you! Where you don't need to carry a card, switch the AC on or off, or even suffer trying to adjust the bathroom water temperature!  (I personally always hate that last bit) 

Around 2-3 years ago I was tasked by my CEO to drive the building of an outstanding technology design for an Italian branded 40 suites VIP hotel in Dubai (Also was a franchisee to our company group & was supposed to hold one of the biggest international attractions) targeting a very selected guests type. A task I later came to know was on & off for over 2 years.

How hard is it to stand out in Dubai? it turns quite hard.

I wasn't as well versed in hospitality technologies back then, but I had an idea of what a guest may want to experience & no one else is currently offering. The plan was to hire a contract-based specialist at later stage to test & demonstrate in a mock-up room as well as estimate budget for each technology idea. 

And so we started, few months later we presented to the board that cool concept of a fully integrated smart hotel in which guest experiences included:

• Selecting your preferred room temperature & water temperatures as you check-in from the app coming from the airport or during your booking, those values are automatically pushed to the RMS system & the smart faucets! (Yeah there's smart faucets) and are activated as soon as you get into the lobby (no more getting heat or cold struck until the AC balances the room temperature) 

• You're identified & greeted as soon as you enter the hotel lobby to check-in (If you chose to physically check-in at all of course!)

• You're greeted & served in the room by a digital assistant (Nothing as global as Echo Amazon's digital assistant of course) with on-screen room service Avatar as an option allowing you to do everything hotel-related, either by saying it or by gesture (heck at some point people got excited and started thinking Holograms!)

• Proximity & guest-routine based services, those included many things like: intuitive way finding based on guest's planned activities, adjust the room temperature to another preset for when you're done working out & recommended activities and offers, suggested activities & offers near-by.

• Keyless entry to your room as well as guest-only areas, as well as adding purchased items & services to your room cheque without revealing your room number(back then only Sheraton moved towards NFC based room access)

• On ceiling daylight/ schemes changeable based on day activities,  mood, or user selection (2 months ago I found this amazing old commercial from Philips ​doing something similar, except their's was more advanced, sadly not for sale though) 

And this was not even the full list.

Aside from the guest experience which required flexible PMS integration, there were multiple business opportunities waiting to be unlocked, for instance if the hotel managed restaurants could tightly integrate their PoS to the group-wide ERP they can all enjoy a bigger discount together with the other group businesses based on quantity procurement.

A change at the C-level management struck & resulted in dropping the full-time specialist hiring & new plans to do the job in-house & to partially fund the mock-up with participating vendors, and of course with the fact that it's no one's full-time job & that it's too much for a side job I only managed to push through to the point of key vendors selection & technology specs evaluation.  

It was around that time that I left the company & I heard later the whole hotel project was scrapped although I can't confirm it.

While I certainly hoped for a much glorious ending back then. You know, something that I can add to my major projects list. I still think it's one of the most exciting projects I worked on. And certainly a source for lots of knowledge. 
It was also the year I accidentally learned to build & use Customer Personas.  

Some may argue that transformation means taking an existing process or function of yours & digitizing that, but I believe if you take any industry-wide aspect or belief & change it to unlock new business opportunity or disrupt a market state you're digitally transforming.

The good part is that most of those concepts could be achieved a lot easier & cheaper now. Weirdly though many of them are not applied anywhere yet! 

Even better there's lots of similar & better opportunities all around us waiting to be discovered & executed upon. 

We have to agree that being a futurist will introduce you to some unfamiliar challenges, there's some tricks on how to overcome them though. But that's another post so stay tuned.