IPTV: The New PMS?

The recent China Hospitality Technology Alliance (CHTA) Reload conference in Shanghai was once again a great opportunity to catch up with technology developments  in the hospitality sector. There were some interesting presentations, too. One on wearables, for example, put the recent hype about Smart Watches and their applications firmly in its place by pointing out the current shortfalls, such as battery life, being tethered to a 'mother' device and, most importantly for the hospitality industry, the lack of standardisation and adaptability which is always the greatest impediment whenever consumer electronics enter the enterprise space.  

Needless to say that I found the presentation on IPTV the most relevant.

IPTV Slide Presented at the CHTA meeting

The message from the chair of the IPTV Standardisation group was clear: IPTV is a key customer service platform and as such is just as important for a hotel as PMS. This is quite an exciting shift from just a few years back when IPTV was seen as 'nice to have' as opposed to 'essential'.

The PMS system is of course the holy grail of a hotel operation as it facilitates hosting hundreds of different people, night after night, smoothly and efficiently - albeit by predominantly operating at the backend. IPTV on the other hand, being the connection between hotel backend and customer facing frontend, is the point where enterprise and consumer interface - the holy grail of guest communication if you like (post check-in, naturally). The two together are a powerful package that, if done properly, combine hotel operation and guest communication on one integrated platform.

Standardisation: walking a fine line

The important point with any attempt at standardisation is that it shouldn't curtail the inherent flexibility of an IPTV system. This is a very fine line to walk indeed. Network set up, cabling constraints, content and features - where do you draw the line?

Also, equally important as defining what IPTV should be is to define what it should not be. IPTV is not a computer, and it is not a mobile device - although it should interact and enable both, and across operating systems. But this is why mobile- and computer oriented services such as We Chat, Skype and social media sites should have no room on it, at least not in their original formats. A hotel we have deployed recently, for example, is curating posts from their Twitter, Facebook and Weibo pages and putting them as images on their IPTV platform on a monthly basis. That's perfect: it's entertainment and it has been customised to work on the TV screen.

But with 72% of web page views now done on mobiles, why try and squeeze 

Share of webpage views, January 2015.
Source: wearesocial.net/blog

the square peg of (say) Weibo into a round hole like IPTV, specifically if the user experience can never be as good as on a mobile (think on screen keyboards...)? And let's not forget the myriad security and bandwidth issues that come with turning the TV into a web browser. Again, it may be ok at home, but a hotel is an all together different environment where rules are set by the lowest common denominator: the worst possible scenario, such as someone downloading masses of pirated movies, clogging the bandwidth for everyone else, or people browsing onto dubious sites infested with viruses.

Here IPTV plays a key role as the facilitator that fits the spare pegs into round holes by integrating guests' own devices, rather than trying to replicate them. 

No doubt these points, and many more, will be mulled over as the IPTV Standards group is preparing its recommendations. But no matter what the final document will look like, let's hope it will contribute towards drawing the lines clearer as to IPTV's role in hotels for all parties.   

The Challenges of Delivering a Networked Hospitality Experience – Part1: PMS

At the recent Hotel Technology Conference in Singapore one of the topics discussed was the wisdom of putting devices into hotel rooms. A good question, given the fact that the average traveler tends to be accompanied by more than just one connected device. Wouldn’t it be easier to utilise the guest’s devices with downloadable apps and the like, rather than go to the expense of bulk buying expensive hard ware that may be outdated within 12 months?

The instinctive answer may be ‘yes’, but whether you rely on guests’ own devices or decide to put devices or technologies in the room for guest use, the key for designing a successful service in both cases comes down to how easily those technologies and services can be used and how effective they can be managed.

Unfortunately there is not one single provider that can take care of every technology requirement in a hotel. Within a hotel’s technology belly there are at any given time a number of different systems, protocols and versions trying to play with each other, which makes incorporating various new technologies to enhance the guest experience and a unified approach to interface and service workflow difficult.

The check-in process:
still unchanged & tedious

One of the main culprits seems to be PMS. The ideal of the PMS as the “master mind” of a hotel that manages everything from front desk, equipment, maintenance and guest preferences through a single piece of software is increasingly hard to find. Many PMS’ are lagging behind the ever faster spinning guest tech curve, which results in the dissonance in providing a smooth and unified approach when managing these devices and services in hotels, even in newly built properties. Case in point: the check-in process, which remains largely unchanged – and tedious.

While you can read that the hottest PMS trends currently are mobile optimisation for management and guest-facing systems, given that we are now in year 6 of the iPhone and year three of the iPad – which arguably kicked off our current smart device revolution – this seems hopelessly late.

Enter the Cloud

To overcome the barrier to creating a highly integrated hospitality environment, convergence of all subsystems in the private or public Cloud may be the only way forward, particularly if we are talking about fixed or mobile guest device management.

While the debate is still ongoing in the hospitality industry whether cloud services provide sufficient control, security and connectivity, as an ex telco-person it is clear to me that there is no better way of managing critical data efficiently than in the cloud (see here a good article on the benefits of the Cloud for hospitality).  

From the perspective of guest device management, the most important benefits are a unified management interface, ease of systems updates and lower Total Cost of Ownership.

But what the Cloud doesn’t automatically deliver is improved hospitality services. This still depends on the functionality of the PMS, regardless of whether it’s running from the Cloud or not.

Kiva robots in action
(image courtesy of Kiva Systems)

A good example – albeit outside the hospitality industry - of how a unified technology ecosystem can make a difference is the story of Kiva Systems, a supply-chain robot-maker which was bought by Amazon last year for $775 million. Kiva is a highly integrated system that uses robots to retrieve and carry entire shelf-units of packages to appropriate shipping points. There is a great article here that explains how Kiva is an integral part of the migration into Cloud computing by connecting the virtual world to the physical world. It’s a great example of what true convergence should look like and I hope we will see similar initiatives in the hospitality technology space soon.