When consumers are at home, they have a world of entertainment at their fingertips. Through their TV, they can use a variety of streaming services; they can use fitness and mindfulness apps; they can listen to music and play video games.
Today, they expect to have the same access in hotel rooms when they travel.
Hotels either have their own systems to provide entertainment or they work with external companies, who provide everything they need, but under the hotel’s brand. The names of companies like Innspire and Enseo, which offer these services, are not known to hotel guests.
Innspire is a technology platform for hotels. Guests can use it to log into their own streaming platform such as Netflix or Apple TV; they can cast their phone screen onto the TV and watch anything that’s on their phone, or they can watch regular TV.
Enseo is a digital platform that works with upscale and upper-upscale properties “to help them craft what they are providing for the experience for the guest,” said Brian Gurley, CEO. The goal, he said, is to “eliminate operators’ pain points.”
In-room entertainment has changed enormously in recent years, said Robin Koetje, vice president of IT, Staypineapple, a 10-hotel chain headquartered in Seattle, Washington. It uses Enseo in some properties and its own system in others.
Offering content has shifted, he said, from giving options, some of which customers can buy, to being a similar experience to what they have at home. “Now, everyone has their content and it’s in their pocket. Really what guests want is the most easy and convenient vehicle to get their content on the TV and we have to make it as frictionless as possible.”
Personalized Experience
A personalized experience for guests begins the moment they walk into a room and see the TV displaying a welcome message, with their name.
Innspire can personalize to groups, with specific content like photos offered to a wedding party or an agenda to attendees of a conference. It can be more general information—a reminder about happy hour or that the pool is closed for cleaning or even be guest-specific to VIP guests, providing information about a jazz bar that might appeal to them, for example.
And wellness options can be personalized to certain rooms that have a wellness suite or rooms with Peloton equipment or yoga mats, Innspire President of the Americas Anne Frye, said. “We customize by room; there might be different options in their room, like meditation or stretching for example.”
Enseo wants hotels to be able to offer specific options to guests. If a customer who loves golf and French restaurants is visiting, they like the hotel to be able to suggest specific things in line with those interests. These options are displayed in the guestroom, separate from the booking path, “allowing hotels to reach guests in unique ways once they are on property,” Gurley said.
Making Life Easy … For the Guest
Today, in-room entertainment “is really about putting the guest in control so they can do what they want,” said Nikolai Ursin, corporate director of brand marketing, Virgin Hotels, Coconut Grove, Fla., whose in-room system comes from Innspire. “Our whole brand philosophy is taking the friction out of travel.”
Consumers, he said, have subscriptions to streaming platforms “and want to be able to catch the next episode of what they’re watching.”
Virgin also likes to offer wellness options. Each of its seven hotels (five in the U.S., two in the U.K.) features rooms with a two-chamber design—a sleeping chamber and a dressing chamber with yoga mats, separated by a door. So if there’s more than one person, one can use a wellness app in the dressing chamber while their partner sleeps.
Staypineapple’s system is designed to be so simple that guests can scan a QR code and cast to the TV in less than 30 seconds. Sometimes the home screens can be “overwhelming, with menus to go through before you get to what you want,” said Koetje. “Ours was designed to just be what you need, [without] menus that do not add to the guest's experience.”
Enseo’s system allows guests to scan a QR code and turn their phone into a remote control, but the company is aware that older guests may not be comfortable with that. So, it’s also releasing a luxury remote control with larger buttons and a backlit screen later this year, making it easier for older guests to navigate the TV. “We’re trying to make it an even better experience,” said David Goldstone, president of hospitality. “Sometimes all people want to do is channel up and channel down.”
… For the Hotel
It’s important that in-room entertainment systems are also easy for a hotel to set up and manage.
“Hotels are looking for a seamless experience,” said Frye. Until recently mostly hotels had a set-top box behind the TV but typically these days that is embedded into the television set, and Innspire is integrated with certain LG and Samsung models. Some also have Google Cast embedded, which means no dongle is needed for streaming or casting, either. Eliminating these items, she said, means there’s no hardware “and less for the hotel staff to worry about” and cleaning becomes easier. For the guest, she added, it leads to a much sleeker look.
For elements beyond entertainment that are integrated with the TV, certain things have to be built into the room, said Ursin. So if the lights can be turned on and off, the door locked and unlocked, from the TV, that needs to be built in.
“There’s an upfront cost to that that our hotel developers have to pay, but in the long run it pays for itself in operational efficiency,” he said. Even when retrofitting for this—which costs more—the cost, he said, “is not astronomical and it pays for itself quite quickly.”
To make it easy for hotel properties, Enseo is able to fix 95 percent of all problems remotely, meaning there’s less work for the hotel’s engineering and technology teams.
Revenue Generators
Pay-per-view movies, now a thing of the past, were previously a revenue generator for hotels. But there are still revenue-generating options, said Frye.
“A hotel wants to drive revenue in as many ancillary spots as it can,” she said, explaining that the television “is a marketing and relationship hub.” Depending on what a hotel requests, Innspire can use the TV to feature local businesses (who pay advertising to the property) or can keep it simple and provide a more residential feel.
With most hotels, the in-room entertainment is integrated with the hotel’s POS system for in-room dining “and that’s the number one way they’re increasing revenue,” Frye said. Some hotels, she said, can drive up to $60,000 in revenue per month for that service. “So that’s a big revenue opportunity.” The spa is another one, she said, and guests can view services and scan a QR code to book them.
The revenue from in-room dining “more than offsets the lost revenue” from movies, said Ursin. And it’s almost second nature to travelers now, he said, to order food through technology.
Virgin Hotels typically don’t have spas, he said, but the London and New York properties have third party spas in the buildings, which guests can check out through the TV. Giving guests that ability, he said, “is benefiting the hotel because it’s keeping the guests happy. We look at the spa as part of the guest experience.”
Staypineapple hotels don’t have spas or dining options but instead the company gets creative, said Koetje. “We are in these cool cities, and the city is kind of our resort so we have advertising partnerships or things that can generate a package add-on (like tickets offered through, or to, a local business).
And contrary to what it seems, video on demand “is not dead,” said Enseo’s Goldstone. “We have a robust video on demand in the system now. Casinos are still mandating it and some brands say they must have it, especially first-run movies.”
But Enseo’s updated this and is making it much easier to order these movies. Coming later this year, a new feature from Enseo will allow guests to use their hotel points to pay for things like movies and in-room dining.
“If they can pay for food and beverage through the TV, they are going to order more because they can bring up pictures of what it looks like and think about a wine they’d like with their food, and add some side dishes,” said Goldstone. Or put another way, another great revenue-generator.
What’s Popular
Despite the personalization and the ability to cast anything from a phone, the most popular reason to watch a hotel television is to watch good old-fashioned TV stations.
For Innspire, about 55 percent of interactions with the TV are traditional television, and 45 percent are casting. Guests typically cast when they have more time and are watching for longer, said Frye.
At Virgin Hotels, watching TV is the most popular activity, followed by casting from a customer’s phone, then watching Netflix directly through the TV (through logging in) and ordering in-room dining.
Ursin isn’t surprised TV is the most popular choice. “Think of what people are traveling for. Our hotels are in city centers, so often people are traveling for business. At the end of the day people just want to put something on and see the news and see what the weather is in the morning. They’re not staying in our hotels to sit and watch movies; they’re out exploring.”
The importance of the TV depends on the nature of your travel, said Koetje. Some guests like to have it on as a background. Guests traveling with children value it greatly, he said. And you have to be careful what you offer. “You have to be covering the spectrum of news networks and can’t be making a political statement with what you’re providing; then you have the sports networks; and the rest is filler.”
Casting is the second most popular choice, he said. Because signing into a streaming account via the TV remote is “clunky.”
The most important factor to offer through a TV is “ fast and reliable wifi,” said Goldstone. “Fast wifi is as important as hot running water in a hotel.”
He agrees that it depends on the nature of who is in the room. “With children it’s an absolute must to be able to stream or cast their kids’ content.”
Whether guests want to watch traditional television does depend, to some degree, on what’s going on in the world, he added. “The Artemis II launch brought the country together and the World Cup is coming, so soccer fans are going to be watching that.”
Allowing hotels to track what guests in general—not specifically because it’s intrusive—are using their TVs for is very helpful for them, Goldstone said. “That is part and parcel of the service we provide to a hotel. If a hotel has been sold on HBO Max but no one’s using it, why would they have the expense of it?”
So long as the television offers what appears to be a home-away-from-home experience, guests will continue to be happy with a hotel’s entertainment.
This article was originally published in the June/July edition of Hotel Management magazine. Subscribe here.