Wednesday 29 June 2011

The Problem with Predicting Future Technologies for Hotels

While science fiction movies routinely deliver the inspiration for technology innovation, it's what they don't predict that's really interesting
Being able to peek into what the future will bring has been at the forefront of human desire for as long as we have existed. It’s the basic foundation from religion (heaven and hell come to mind) through Nostradamus and right down to the more recent fascination with all things futuristic, that probably started when H.G. Wells published his novel “The Time Machine” in the dying days of the 19th century. A few years back, the science fiction movie everyone loved to quote in our industry was Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report, released in 2002, which was a marketer’s dream for its depiction of a world in which advertising is so tailored, targeted and ubiquitous that it merges seamlessly into everyday life, to do its work of subtle (or not so subtle) persuasion. It seemed all so very plausible and within grasp then, not least because digital signage technology had just made an entrance into the advertising world in a major way.
Fast forward nearly 10 years and we haven’t really moved on that much. According to film lore, Spielberg consulted numerous scientists in the lead up to the film in an attempt to present a more plausible future world for the year 2054 than usually imagined in science fiction films and many articles have been written over the years about how many of the film’s imagined technologies have become reality. But let’s not get too carried away. Yes, companies have invented a lot of things that make an appearance in the movie, such as electronic paper, facial recognition advertising billboards and 3D televisions, and some were most probably even inspired by the movie to do so.
The thing is though, that precious few of these inventions have entered the main stream (3D TVs being the exception), not even facial recognition technology, which has been hailed as the holy grail by digital signage providers for years now. But then you can reasonably argue that with the movie set in 2054, we haven’t done so bad after all, given that we have another 40 odd years to make all the other technologies mainstream.
However, far more interesting than what science fiction movies from the Jetsons to Star Wars and yes, Minority Report, did predict, is what they did not predict: the Internet, for one. Or Facebook  Or Twitter, in fact the whole social networking phenomenon. These technology-driven trends have, and continue to shape our lives at almost every point like no other and yet every single look into the crystal ball has missed mentioning them.
So it was with some trepidation that I consumed the recent predictions of what the hotel room in the year 2030 will look like by Ian Paterson in the study “Travelodge Future of Sleep”.
There are a lot of technologies in there that sound great and believable, being connected in our own virtual reality through a visor or contact lenses and interactive video panels are two that instantly come to mind. This and other useful innovations I can actually imagine making my hotel stay more pleasant, but others seem more appropriate as home applications, rather than additions to the guest experience in a hotel. For example the “Dietary advice from night time monitoring”, which may be a great help when I’m at home and in my weekly routine, but the last thing I want when I wake up in a hotel room is a reminder of the banquet meal, pub crawl and karaoke marathon with my customer the night before. Not the least because it will probably require something a lot stronger than is on offer on the breakfast menu to get me back on my feet.
I am also slightly puzzled by the various home-upload features, particularly the 3D room re-skin home away from home upload, where lonely business travelers will be able to choose from a range of layouts including ‘virtual family’. The incredibly sad image this produces in my imagination aside, unless I suffer from pathological homesickness I think I’d rather not have that appearing on my hotel bill.
But then that’s just my preference and this is exactly the problem with trying to predict the future: technological ability and readiness does not equal ubiquity of adoption. The road to innovation is littered with plenty of brilliant ideas based on technological innovation that never got off the ground for one reason or another. What these failed innovations neglected to take into account is something that will be near impossible to quantify for generations to come, maybe forever: human behaviour, which is complex, irrational and variable.  As much as generations of marketers have tried to predict human behaviour through market research, the cold hard truth is that it cannot easily be squeezed into bell curve modeling.
Think about the phenomenal success of Groupon, which left the business world speechless for the simplicity of its premise, even though it is based on satisfying one of the most basic of human instincts: to get a good deal. So for my part, the next time someone asks me what I predict the next killer-app for a hotel to be, I think I opt for a good bed.