Viceroy Hotels & Resorts is expanding its relationship with Volara to power in-room smart speakers and enable automated voice services at its luxury boutique hotels. Viceroy L’Ermitage Beverly Hills (Calif.) is the third property in the brand’s portfolio to add Amazon Alexa devices powered by Volara in all guestrooms. Viceroy’s Hotel Zetta San Francisco and Viceroy Los Cabos in Baja California are already equipped with Volara and relying on it to support their voice on command in-room initiative. The remaining Viceroy properties are scheduled to adopt the solution in 2020.
“Wanting to further make the Viceroy guest experience feel like a natural extension of how our guests operate daily, we incorporated a voice technology solution into our guestrooms,” Darren Clark, VP of technology for Viceroy Hotels & Resorts, said in a statement. “Volara meets the complex technical specifications of the hotel and simultaneously adheres to our obligation to ensure guest privacy.”
“When we began looking at voice technologies, we hoped to find a partner that was innovative and flexible with integrations to other third-party applications,” Clark continued. “Volara understood our vision, and it already had integrations to more than 40 hotel technologies, including [internet protocol] TV, room controls, [private branch exchange], music and work order-management. Security was also extremely important to us. Volara ensures that recordings of guests are never associated with their personally identifiable information. They make sure that all recordings of guests are deleted within 24 hours—a distinct difference from the management of user recordings in the consumer environment.”
To date, guest feedback on having Alexa in rooms has been positive and reflected in online reviews and post-stay surveys. On average, the property is seeing a broad array of interactions ranging from controlling the TV and streaming music to making requests and asking about hotel amenities and services. Feedback from group business and wedding parties has been extremely positive as well.
Volara’s integration to Inncom by Honeywell is enabling the hotel's guests to control lighting, do not disturb/make up room settings and room temperature; integration to Sonifi is allowing guests to use their voices to control the TV, change channels and adjust the volume; integration to the Alice hotel operations platform is seamlessly transmitting guest requests for pillows, toothbrushes, minibar refreshments and more; integration to iHeartRadio is enabling guests to play music and listen to podcasts; and the solution is facilitating direct calls through Alexa to the front desk, concierge, valet etc.
Viceroy also is considering a voice assistant solution powered by Volara for back-of-house applications to streamline engineering tasks, enable room status changes and facilitate staff-to-staff communications.
