How the Age of Tweaking Impacts Hotel Operations

One of the better articles I read among the avalanche of tributes and rebukes after Steve Job’s passing was Malcolm Gladwell's "The Tweaker" in the New Yorker (free access). In essence, Gladwell distilled Job’s talent as that of being a master tweaker, who was compelled to make what already existed better, such as the ordinary digital music player which became the superior iPod, or a chunky Microsoft tablet PC, which Jobs tweaked into the sleek iPad.

But what was actually more interesting to me in this article was how Gladwell spelled out the clear distinction between inventor and tweaker. It’s not rocket science, but reading it I realized that we indeed live in the Age of Tweaking, rather than in the Age of Invention.

I took this concept to a recent conference here in Hong Kong, The World Research Summit for Tourism, where I was, sadly, the lone industry speaker among 300 or so academics from all over the world. The gist of my presentation was that in the Age of Tweaking, the underlying technology becomes more important than ever.

The above diagram shows how media platforms and innovation have evolved over the past 120 years or so. What you can see clearly here is that the media landscape has changed more in the past 5 years than it had the 100 years before that. And as we were heading towards the end of the 20^th century, content increasingly started to migrate across different media networks and platforms, including the TV mobile, web or even games platforms. So why is that? It’s because we have moved from the Age of Invention, to the Age of Tweaking. The TV was an invention, but the connected TV is a monumental tweak of the underlying invention.

When you look at how long it took for entertainment devices to gain a market share of 50 million, you’ll get a picture like this:

What’s striking is that from the point the internet went mainstream, the tweaking of communication accelerated and adoption of new applications climbed to unprecedented levels, as witnessed by Facebook and Twitter’s subscriber explosion. It’s clear that the internet created an environment of building blocks that gave new meaning to Product Life Cycle 101: Tweaking, which builds on something that is already familiar, makes adoption much easier than something that is invented from scratch and has to be heavily marketed to build familiarity and adoption.

So in other words: the more you tweak, the quicker the adoption and faster commercial gains.

Looking at some of the recent inventions that did not get off the ground underlines this. Time Magazine a while ago published a list of the worst inventions of all times, which contains some poignant examples of how invention can fail despite a brilliant and complex technology.  The Segway people mover is a classic example. I wonder if it failed because, as a new invention, it was too much of a stretch for people to learn how to use it. Who knows if we might see the technology emerge in another form, sometime in the future, with a bit of creative tweaking. 

Let’s look at what actually happened when the internet entered the mainstream. I’m not talking about being able to Google something or send emails. I am talking about Internet Protocol as a delivery technology. IP has touched all industries and walks of life because of its more adaptive attributes, lower networking, equipment and administration costs, centralized network control and management and better communications capabilities, productivity and flexibility. These advantages are particularly important for a hotel operation that has to handle many different technologies efficiently, including energy, security and communication.

In fact, IP is probably the king of tweakable technologies, because of its flexibility and capability which is why it will remain the key enabler of technology delivery for the foreseeable future. The important part here is that the underlying technology platform comes first, applications second. If you have a powerful enough technology platform that can be tweaked to accommodate future needs, you will be able to accommodate the next wave of tweaked applications as they enter the mainstream. Don’t forget, predictions put the number of connected devices in the market in the coming years in the trillions and China alone will have nearly 5 billion connected devices by 2020.

So as time to market for technology innovation continues to contract dramatically, hotels more than ever have to be flexible. But innovation is set to be facilitated by tweaking rather than inventing, so it’s important to focus on the underlying technology that will support tweaked technologies. With IP, we have a very robust technology now, and hoteliers should focus on the knowledge and technology available today to lay the foundations for the future. A robust technology will enable adding new applications in the future without major investment and with short time frames.

Internet charges in hotels II: finding the middle ground in the multi-device world

In my last blog I mentioned some measures hotels can take to balance internet charges with guest expectations, so in this blog I’d like to get into more detail on what these actually are.

Whenever there are new research results released on what guests want in a hotel room (and there seems to be an abundance of these right now), one message is repeated again and again from Rio to Rabat and Berlin to Beijing: strong, fast internet access and for free, please. In a world where connectivity is taken for granted, and much information and other content provided for free, this is an understandable expectation – much like I imagine it became a standard to have a TV set in a hotel room, provided at no cost to the guest, 50 odd years ago.

If you are working in the hospitality technology space, it’s about now you may be inclined to feel a little nostalgic about those days when the highest tech gadgets in the room were a colour TV and a basic internet connection to let you cover off emails while one of 20 channels keeps you company in the background. The fact that these times don’t seem all that long ago reinforces that entertainment consumption and access has changed more in the past 5 years than it had in the 100 years before, a process that shows no signs of abating any time soon. 

The figures supporting these changes are truly staggering. If one billion new Internet users and 1 zettabyte (yes it’s a real word - over 1 trillion gigabytes) of Internet traffic in the next 4 years, as Intel predicted recently, are a bit too abstract to process, go to your average electronics retailer to see that it’s increasingly difficult to find consumer electronic devices that are NOT Wifi enabled – and I am not talking of the obvious e-readers, tablets or Blu-ray players here. Samsung just recently released its RF4289 refrigerator which comes with an 8-inch touchscreen and connects to the internet over WiFi, making Cisco’s prediction that there will be 15 billion connected devices by 2015 a lot more believable.

It is no wonder, and I suppose inevitable, that our fascination with the gadget, our connectivity addiction and the ubiquity of both is affecting the hospitality industry. Whether it is one conspicuous individual, traveling with laptop, iPad and smartphone, all vying to be “plugged” in to broadband access, or the modern family with its individual family members wanting to connect their respective devices when staying in the same room: the flood of connected devices will create a headache for hotels who, on one hand have to manage bandwidth cost, but on the other hand risk alienating their guests with escalating per-device charges.

But the industry is starting to experiment with alternatives. An increasing number of hotels choose to offer internet Free to Guest (FTG) as a marketing and branding tactic. While this will no doubt keep multi-device travelers happy, it may create serious bandwidth issues down the line if you read a recent In-Stat survey which says about 86% of tablet and smartphone owners are using them to watch video. Some hotels I have encountered in the region that offer internet FTG have started to warn their guests that if the amount of traffic a guest incurs exceeds a certain threshold it will cut access or move it to a lower tier. Whether this is real or just a threat I am not entirely sure (I’ve never been cut off), but personally I don’t believe that threatening your guests is a particularly effective measure if you are operating in a fiercely competitive service industry.

One of the areas where hotels can get some inspiration may be the airline industry and the way premium airlines handle their in-flight entertainment. Anyone who is familiar with the content industry knows that the VoD content on offer on flights has to be paid for through minimum guarantee and/or revenues share agreements with the relevant studios. Airlines recoup these costs (and then some, presumably) through advertising and absorbing them in the ticket price, which means they are not visible for customers who assume the content is offered to them for “free”, which creates a positive brand image. Perception is everything, so why not adopt the same principle for internet access in hotels rather than shoving the unpopular charges in guests’ faces? Based on historical data, hotels can average out bandwidth usage and spread the cost evenly across all room charges.

But it may be inevitable for hotels to introduce more predictable ways to manage their bandwidth costs while at the same time meeting guest expectations and corporate quality standards. One way of doing so is for hoteliers to look to the telco space where tiered systems with different Classes of Service (CoS) have been in use for some time. There are some similarities already inherent in High Speed Internet Access commonly deployed in hotels. The HSIA in hotels is predominantly built on a centralized gateway to the internet that effectively resembles an Edge Router, which in the telco world is commonly used as a single point of traffic management enabling different CoS to be applied to different users. While telco-class edge routers would be overkill for comparatively small operation like a hotel, there are a number of enterprise-class solutions available that are more suitable for hotels.

On the other hand, some major network equipment vendors have started to provide CoS capability with a software upgrade which eliminates the necessity for edge router-type equipment completely. While their solutions thus far are targeted to the telco world, it shouldn’t be long before lower-end versions will be made available to enterprise applications.

Either way, hotels need to get creative to bridge the gap between guest expectation and commercial reality and to do so, it is necessary to include both technical as well as strategic considerations to find the solution that benefit a hotel’s individual needs.