Blah Tech Coming to a Hotel Near You: We Need Major Fixes Now
by Robert McGarvey’
The headline in hotel trade pub Hotel News Now made me wince: “Personalization, Tight Budgets Dictate Hotel Tech in 2021.”
The sub-head was the face slap: Lack of Funds Hamper Tech Improvements.
Here’s the problem: pre-Covid most hotels I stayed in desperately need significant tech upgrades.
In the Covid era that has not changed. In fact, hotels need more tech because of Covid such as touchless, keyless room entry, apps that permit self-check in and checkout without interacting with a front desk, and – ideally – I want just about everything in the room controllable by an Alexa or Google device and, yes, I have both apps on my phone and both kinds of devices around my home.
Just as I can turn on a light, or a TV, without touching the device at home I now want that same interface in shared spaces such as a hotel room.
Sure, the Covid crisis will pass and probably by mid 2022 just about all of us who will get vaccinated will have been. Business travel will substantially pick up, possibly in Q4 2021. It will never reach the heights it achieved in 2019 but pick up it will.
But we’ll be wanting all that touchless and remote interface tools in hotels even once Covid begins its slow vanishing act because we have gotten used to them.
There goes a good chunk of hotel tech monies.
The money pile will definitely not be tall because hotel analytics company STR has officially declared 2020 the “worst year on record.” How bad is it? So bad that already bottom feeders are circling, looking to pick up failing hotels for pennies on the dollar.
Here’s the problem: there already was a stack of critical hotel tech upgrades that had seemed to be on permanent pause, despite their being needed.
Such as?
In case it has been so long since you have been in a hotel that you have forgotten the tech miseries they inflicted on us, here are the three worst.
Dramatically better hotel WiFi is necessary. Zoom recommends a minimum speed of 1.5 MBPS – but personally I want many times that. I usually connect at around 350 MBPS – 346 this a.m. – via Google mesh and still I have recurring sound issues on Zoom.
How fast is hotel WiFi? A website hotelwifitest says it has the data and, in a glance at Phoenix, the fastest wifi I saw was 26.9 at Aloft Airport. The slowest was 4.6 at Pointe Hilton Tapatio Cliffs Resort.
I cannot vouch for the recency of these data but it doesn’t matter. Those who have used a lot of hotel wifi don’t need a website to tell us the obvious: hotel wifi sucks.
Wifi at events and meetings is if anything worse than in-room wifi.
Remember, use VPN and your speed loss may be 10 to 30%, sometimes more.
These speeds are abysmal. Why so slow? Hoteliers have simply been reluctant to invest in the gear needed to up the speed – even as guests stumble with connections to everything from Netflix to Zoom to corporate servers.
We live online, in the cloud, and yet hoteliers are foisting antiquated and slow Internet at us.
It has to stop and, very probably, as travelers return to hotels one of the first things they notice is the lack of Internet speed. Complaints will be loud, angry and possibly online (if the users can get online). Get in line and be ready to yell.
Improved cellular access is a must. When my home WiFi goes out, I shrug, pick up a T-Mobile phone and create a hotspot (and the cellular data is free on that account). How easy is that?
Except it often doesn’t work in hotels where bad cellular is a longstanding problem. Here’s a 2004 New York Times article headlined: The Cellphone That Doesn’t Work at the Hotel.
Nothing has improved in 17 years.
Often, too, the voice connections also falter. How often have you had dropped calls at a hotel?
There are fixes, they are known – but hoteliers haven’t wanted to spend the money and that was before the pandemic. Their willingness to part with the cash for reliable cellular is no higher now.
Maybe they still hope we will pick up their inroom phone and use it (although I cannot remember the last time I did).
So shall we must and will yell about bad cellular when we are back on the road.
Porous hotel cyber security. I have written about this so often I have little left to say except that our personal data – everything from credit card numbers to loyalty account log ins – has been leaking out of hotels for decades.
Hotels need to take this seriously and agree to a hotel safe data pledge.
We need to yell, loudly and often, to remind hotels they are compromising our Internet security by not taking their own security seriously.
That’s three big tech steps forward, on top of the Covid related steps. Will hoteliers heed any of our demands? What I can say with certainty is that if we don’t lift our voices they will do the same exact nothing about these three tech frailties for a decade.
Speak up or suffer in silence.