Just picture yourself standing wearily outside your hotel room and swiping the digital key repeatedly but in vain. This is something many frequent travelers can relate to. This experience is not only annoying, but also reflects poorly on the hotel’s management.
The culprit behind this nuisance are worn out or dead batteries in the door unlocking mechanism. However, there is no quick fix to this and a hotel technician has to physically intervene, unlock the door, reprogram the device and install fresh batteries.
All this while, you will annoyingly wait for this ordeal to end so that you may gain access to the very room you have paid for. A big name in the hospitality industry, Hilton has rose to the occasion and figured out a smart solution to this problem by leveraging the power of the cloud.
The door lock mechanism has been integrated with the hotel’s cloud network. Using the cloud, the current health of batteries is constantly monitored and the system generates an alert well before the batteries pass out. In this way, the hotel’s management has ample time to replace the door batteries before they annoy some guest.
This initiative is part of a larger program that the hotel chain dubs as “Connected Room”. The idea is to empower each guest to perform certain routine tasks via Hilton’s smartphone app. The app will enable a guest to customize the in-room entertainment, order food or a ride to start with.
Given the sheer scale of the company’s operations, it was decided that no ready made solution would be deployed. Rather Hilton is developing the Connected Room concept from the ground up. After successful testing, the concept will be formally commissioned across the nearly 590 Hilton locations in 140 countries.
The management highlighted the immense improvement in the overall customer experience by resolving a persistent problem with such a simple solution. We can conclude that in addition to solving large scale issues, cloud computing can definitely be used to streamline smaller issues and bottlenecks as well.
