A new focus on interactive content

15 Mar, 2012 By: Andrew Sheivachman

A new wave of signage technology requires a new approach to creating content that appeals to guests and accurately reflects the image of a hotel brand.

“We’ve taken signage to all new levels by using more of an applications approach,” said Erick Domareck, national account manager for full-service hospitality at Four Winds Interactive.

Four Winds worked on Marriott’s trailblazing GoBoard interactive sign, and works with brands such as InterContinental Hotels Group, Marriott International and Omni Hotels & Resorts on interactive signage projects. “On a lot of our signs, we’ve borrowed a lot of user elements behind all the smartphones and the tablets,” Domareck said. “By taking that applications approach, we’ve made it more user friendly from the guests’ perspective.”

Some see a shift in the attitude of hotel owners. “It’s good to get away from the guestroom and try to understand the public area because it’s not the easiest of [sections] and has also been a bit amateurish in a sense,” said Juan Aguirre, VP of business development at Acentic, a provider of hotel TV platforms. “It’s been a bit flat apart from showing meeting room information and running an advert for a bar. It’s not exactly a turn on for hoteliers and I think that’s changing.”

A more advanced signage system can also interact with property systems, allowing integrated control of displays across a property. “There are numerous solutions out there, from extremely basic PowerPoint players all the way up to the more enterprise solutions like ours and the other big players,” said Domareck. “Higher-end full-service hotels are going to select the more professional established firms because we are 100 percent dedicated to digital signage applications, allow our solutions to evolve and add new apps to our solutions sets. We can also integrate with every event management system, like Delphi, NGS or OPERA. A lot of the smaller one-off companies don’t have the software backend to facilitate that integration.”

Topic : TVs, Digital signage
External Source : Hotel Management

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