AccorHotels UK & Ireland has introduced WhatsApp for guests to communicate with hotel staff. Instead of being obliged to use the phone in their room to contact reception or other hotel facilities or services, they can now simply send a message via the WhatsApp Messenger. One of the world’s most popular messaging apps, WhatsApp has more than 1.3 billion users worldwide.
The service sees guests given a dedicated mobile phone number with their room keycard on arrival. A member of staff monitors requests, which they can immediately respond to, whether for roomservice where offered, housekeeping or a restaurant reservation. Because guests use their own mobile phones to message the hotel, they can make requests wherever they are in or out of the hotel, before, during or after their stay.
The service is now available in around 90 percent of the group’s hotels that are run from the mobile operating system introduced last year, and will be rolled out further at selected hotels in the portfolio. In the hotels where it was first trialled it has generated positive feedback from guests, for whom WhatsApp is an increasingly important method of communication.
“Guests want to communicate using the methods they are most familiar with,” AccorHotels Northern Europe COO Thomas Dubaere said in a statement. “The use of WhatsApp has increased exponentially over the past few years and is a platform most of our guests tell us they feel very comfortable using, so enabling them to use it to order room service or ask reception a question is a logical step to ensuring they have the best possible experience in our hotels.”
The move marks the latest phase in AccorHotels’ introduction of mobile technology to improve the guest and employee experience. In 2017 it began to run the ibis UK network from mobile devices, with employees welcoming and helping guests as well as managing their schedules from an app on their smartphones. This gives staff more time to assist guests and also enabled ibis to remove traditional reception desks altogether.
AccorHotels also recently implemented digital technology that allows guests to order food and drink, process payment and be sent receipts from the same platform via their smartphones.
“Traditionally guests have to read the directory in their rooms with one number for housekeeping, another for the gym, another for the restaurant and so on,” said Carla Milovanov, SVP, digital and technology, AccorHotels Europe and Northern Europe. “This process simplifies communication for guests so they just have one number for all their requests. Because we have already introduced mobile technology to allow staff to run the hotel from smartphones or tablets, staff monitoring WhatsApp requests can action them across all the hotel’s services, wherever they are in the building. It is much more guest-friendly and a much more efficient way of managing requests.”