By DAVID CHURCHILL
customise and personalise the experience,” he told a recent hotel conference in New York. “Imagine a room anywhere you travel with us in the world which we are personalising. We know you and what your preferences are because you’ve told us, and our rooms are adapting to you.” Hilton is not alone in investing in the
future of its hotel brands. Rival Marriott International actually pipped Hilton to the post by opening its own innovation laboratory in late 2016, although it had been planning the venture for several years. Back in 2013, Marriott acquired the run-down Charlotte City Centre hotel in North Carolina for US$111 million with the aim of creating what it described as its first M Beta hotel – a test laboratory of new ideas that it could expose to paying guests as well as potential new hotel owners. As the majority of Marriott’s hotels are
owned by investors, which the hotelier op- erates for them as well as maintaining brand standards, it is in the company’s interest to show a willingness to innovate. But in a canny move last summer, the renovated and innovation-friendly Charlotte hotel – on which Marriott had spent US$40 million – was sold to a financial investor for US$152 million, meaning that Marriott effectively broke even on the deal but gained an inno- vation incubator in the process. Marriott’s innovations at the M Beta
in-room services such as heating, lighting and media. While more than 2,500 Hiltons in the US and Canada (about half the hote- lier’s global room stock) already have this facility enabled, only around 100 of Hilton UK’s properties so far use the technology, according to industry sources.
SECURITY CONCERNS Other chains, including IHG and Hyatt, are reportedly taking a more measured approach to introducing ‘smart room keys’ because of security concerns. These include the hotel’s room management system, which stores important data about a guest’s account being hacked, as well as power failures and the loss or theft of an individual’s phone. But Nassetta also suggests that the use
of such innovative technology is a funda- mental part of the hotel group’s push to get travellers to book direct with the hotel rather than through third parties, such as online travel agencies (OTAs) or TMCs. “As they connect with us directly, we know more about them so that we can
BUYINGBUSINESSTRAVEL.COM Marriott’s M Beta hotel in Charlotte, North Carolina
“Imagine a room anywhere you travel with us in the world which we are personalising”
BBT March/April 2018 35
largely focus on improving the guest experience – from the way they are first greeted to greater use of communal spaces and more flexible meetings and event facil- ities, while rooms are more functional and streamlined. Marriott was also early into the
trend towards allowing guests to stream video services such as Netflix or You Tube on to large, fixed, in-room television screens. Yet Charlotte may not be the ideal
place for some of the more ‘edgy’ concepts coming out of M Beta. A new shower room, for example, developed at the innovation centre is being tested at the Irvine Marriott hotel in California’s Orange County. But this is no ordinary shower: when
the shower’s glass door steams up, a ‘wired’ surface means that any inspiration or thoughts the guest writes or draws with a finger in the misty glass are automatically captured and a picture can subsequently be emailed to a smartphone or tablet. The inspiration behind this special
shower door, called a ‘Splash of Brilliance’, was given some credibility by a Marriott survey of 5,000 international travellers last year which found that just over half those surveyed claimed they had some of their “best ideas” while in the shower. But those wanting to test it out may have to wait: so far the special shower is only available in one of the Irvine hotel’s 496 rooms. Yet it does show the extent to which hotel companies are prepared to go to meet the demand for innovation. Some hotel analysts also suggest that the need to innovate is essential as travellers become more com- fortable with using new technology. “There is a friendly war going on to hook the best and fastest ideas and I think the shower door is part of that,” points out Bjorn Hanson, a professor at New York University’s Tisch Centre for Hospitality and Tourism. So far this ‘friendly war’ has been fairly low key, with Marriott’s strategy based
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