Trust is an unwritten contract between hoteliers, their guests and staff members. In a world that can feel unpredictable, people seek out familiarity. When they walk through the doors of your hotel, they want to know you will take care of them during their stay or work shift. This includes keeping them and their belongings safe.
Guests have an unprecedented number of options when they need a place to stay out of town, from chain hotels to neighborhood vacation rentals. As a hotelier, you cannot afford to lose the trust of your guests and staff. You want them to choose your venue, but staffing shortages continue to present challenges to employers, who need trained staff members to create memorable guest experiences.
A number of employees who left the industry during the pandemic have not returned, despite competitive wage offers and recruitment bonuses. An understaffed hotel cannot adequately meet the needs of a fully booked hotel, and it increases the workload of the staff members who do work there.
The evolution of the hotel industry extends beyond these immediate challenges. Today’s guests are looking for more than a bed and a shower. After living through years of economic insecurity and a global pandemic, they want to feel secure when they’re away from home. They want to know that you’re faithfully taking action to protect their health and physical safety while still addressing their growing expectations for an ever more convenient, personalized and enjoyable hotel stay experience.
This takes on greater importance when you consider that hotels are more than a collection of rooms. They’re becoming more interconnected, with attached convention centers, banquet halls, and common areas with more amenities than traditional lobbies. They also attract larger crowds and create more opportunities for guests to interact. To keep up with the evolution, hoteliers need forward-thinking solutions to enhance property security and ensure that only the people who belong in a given area have access to that area. At the same time and as guests increasingly come to demand a more seamless hotel environment, hoteliers also need to consider how today’s security platforms can work in tandem with other platforms and service offerings to deliver the heightened experiences that today’s guests now routinely demand.
Enhanced security benefits
Cloud-based security solutions offer enhanced security benefits that allow you to maintain a high level of security while saving money. You can’t be everywhere at once, but you can monitor what’s happening throughout the hotel with the right system. Continuous software updates ensure that you always have the latest version of the software to keep the system working properly and protect your data using the latest encryption standards.
Access management
Controlling access to the building is the first step in keeping everyone, and everything, safe. With a cloud-based access management system, you can ensure both secure and convenient access to guestrooms, the pool, fitness center and more so that only the people who should be there are able to enter. At the same time, your hotel staff can securely manage and monitor these operations from anywhere they have an internet connection. Whether at the front desk or traversing a guestroom hallway, you’ll know what’s happening in the building and can address situations in real-time before they become a problem.
Staff safety
Hotel employees spend a considerable amount of time working alone, whether they are cleaning a guestroom, washing linens, or checking in guests. Accidents do happen—mattresses are heavy and floors can be slippery. Situations can also arise where an employee feels threatened by an unruly guest. When they need assistance, they’re able to use features like Staff Safety to request help in real-time. You’re able to identify their exact location and respond sooner rather than later. This level of responsiveness can be a lifesaver for your employees and may meet local staff safety ordinances required by local officials.
Cost benefits
In addition to increasing the security of guests and staff, cloud-based solutions can help you save money. Through the system, you can benefit from an almost limitless number of third-party platform integrations providing an opportunity to more effectively manage and monitor the facility and amenities. This, for example, allows you to minimize energy usage with an access and energy management system integration that can detect a guestroom’s occupancy status and automatically adjust settings for amenities such as thermostats or lights. The cloud-based system itself can be more affordable since you don’t have to continue paying for a new system when your legacy system becomes outdated. Better still, cloud-based platforms also sidestep any need for costly on-site system maintenance and free up hotel staff to focus on other property needs, resulting in a substantial reduction in overall labor costs.
Advantages of cloud-based security solutions
Compared to on-site legacy systems, cloud-based solutions have some key advantages that benefit hoteliers who want to create a convenient, seamless and modern guest experience. Not only do you enjoy real-time system updates, but the systems themselves can be customized to meet your needs and integrate with the systems you already have for a smooth transition.
Real-time updates
Legacy systems typically require manual updates that cost significant time and money to maintain. Cloud-based systems receive updates continuously and automatically. Not only does this free up your labor pool, but it also ensures you have the latest security settings in place, including control over access settings. In a fast-paced world, having the ability to update the system as it’s needed is increasingly important so you can prevent problems before they happen and resolve them as quickly as possible when they do.
Integration
Cloud-based systems easily integrate with existing systems, which can create a smooth transition to the new setup. This can be helpful if you have a system that services a specific purpose not addressed by the cloud system. Integration makes it possible for that system to work in tandem with the new one. It’s also true that some of your current systems may become obsolete in the process, eliminating the need to maintain the servers that currently handle those services.
The value of scale
Unlike legacy systems, cloud-based security solutions can be scaled to meet the needs of the hotel. One-size-fits-all solutions don’t work for hotels, which range from small boutiques with a handful of guestrooms to towering structures that can hold thousands of guests at a time. A cloud-based security solution adapts to meet your needs so you build a system designed to protect the people who work and stay in your hotel. It can significantly continue to be scaled to cover new areas or service offerings as business operations grow. Using Staff Safety solutions as an example, the same network infrastructure used to pinpoint an endangered employee’s location can also be upgraded to monitor the real-time location of hotel assets such as amenity rentals or F&B inventory- saving employee time and ensuring ready availability for the next guest. Other scalability options also include using the same network to monitor the performance of motorized equipment in order to minimize repair costs, providing guests with convenient on-site wayfinding abilities and promoting hotel offerings based on a guest’s real-time location.
Staying ahead of evolving industry trends & expectations
While trying to predict hospitality’s future is fraught with uncertainty, one thing that hoteliers can be sure of is their need to adapt quickly as new trends, requirements or guest preferences emerge. Whether meeting shifting expectations for what counts as a safe hotel environment or addressing increasing demands for enhanced convenience and service personalization, today’s hotels are in need of solutions that can seamlessly evolve and keep pace in order to maintain a competitive business. Cloud-based technologies are undoubtedly proving to be the key allowing hoteliers to maintain modern and always secure property services without leading to exorbitant costs each time a system upgrade is required.
To learn about the latest cloud-based technologies available to today’s hoteliers, visit: https://www.assaabloyglobalsolutions.com/en/industries/hospitality