InterContinental Hotels Group recently announced in-house
mobile and digital pilots, including mobile check-in and a hotel messaging
system. But while the company is thinking up a lot of of innovations, it’s
being cautious about rolling them out.
“It's just something we really want to get right,” said senior
vice president of digital and voice channels Michael Menis. “We're very focused
on understanding the needs of guests, and our priority isn't scale first,
understand guest experience later.”
IHG is testing mobile check-in and check-out technology at a
number of hotels in the Americas region, pairing it with Mobile Folio, which also
would allow guests to view their hotel bills in real-time.
The number of hotels in the pilot “ebbs and flows as we try get
it right based upon brand and customer segment and work out all of the details,”
Menis said. Ultimately, the goal is to make the tool available at all IHG
hotels. The company did promise that United States-based IHG Rewards Club Elite
members will get a crack at the technology first, an effort to encourage direct
booking.
Another piece of IHG’s technology pie is its mobile room key
testing, which includes user experience, security and technology integration,
according to Menis. IHG is developing the tech through in-house lab testing and
some on-site testing.
“It’s too early to commit to a timeline,” Menis said. “It's
just too important a technology to rush. You can look at a lot of other players
who've rushed in this area and really probably ahead of understanding the right
way for it to work, and they're paying the price in terms of guest sentiment.”
IHG became an early adopter of mobile technology in 2011,
when it launched
iPhone booking apps for each of its seven brands. It even tested a
tone-based mobile guestroom key in 2010 at a handful of Holiday Inns, but the program
failed to get off the ground. In the time since, other major hotel companies
like Hilton Worldwide, Marriott
International and Starwood Hotels & Resorts have pushed ahead to offer mobile
check-in, in-app messaging between hotel and guest, and mobile
room keys.
Moving forward, Menis said, IHG’s mobile and digital strategy
is to look beyond booking to think horizontally about the guest experience
prebooking, during the stay and after the stay.
“Mobile is one of the few technologies that enables us to
stay connected with the guest all the way through the journey, and so that
requires us to really think through the right ways for us to improve the
experience at each stay,” he said."
IHG also is doing trials on iBeacon, an in-hotel
messaging app; Guest Request, a service that allows guests to place service
requests through IHG’s app; and Translator App for Apple Watch, which offers
translation assistance for 13 different languages. The iBeacon technology
allows a property to push personalized information, such as restaurant specials
and loyalty reward reminders, to a traveler’s mobile device based on his or her
location in the hotel. Menis sees potential for that technology for other uses,
such as meeting planners pushing agenda information to meeting attendees.