Top 5 ways to give your guests the best ‘Home away from Home’ Experience

A long time ago, Hotels would occupy a very small part of people’s lives and they would get away with basic provisions. But that is not the case anymore. When a guest arrives at your hotel they expect the best. They want to feel like they have not left their home, or even better, they want to feel like they have upgraded. Nobody wants to go to a hotel room that does not match or beat what they have at home.

The best hotels always have the latest and greatest tech giving their guests the optimal experience, so there is no reason why you should not be looking to keep up with the trends. For this reason, we, at Hotel TV Company, are going to share our expertise with you.

1. Video On Demand

Video on demand is seen as one of the classic forms of Hotel entertainment, whether it’s watching BBC iPlayer or streaming movies, there is always something for your guests to enjoy from the comfort of their hotel room. The brilliant thing about some Video on Demand services is that you have access to the latest and greatest movies before other services like Netflix or Amazon Prime. This gives your guests a luxury that many others may not have.

One major benefit of Video on Demand is that there are a wide range of payment options when it comes to implementation in your hotel. There are models in place where you can leave your guests to just put their payment details into the TV and pay for the movies that they want to watch. On the other hand, the hotel can pay a subscription fee to unlock all the movies and let your guests watch what they want, when they want.

2. Internet with no re-cabling (EoC)

If you are an existing hotel, and you do not have any internet access in your hotel room, there is an opportunity for you to get high speed Internet and Wi-Fi into every single room without having to rewire or re-decorate the hotel. It is all done with a small device that sits behind your TV and uses the existing coaxial cabling to provide both TV signal and a hard wired internet connection. The install is very simple, meaning that you can save a lot of money for two reasons:

1. You do not need to hire specialists to dig out walls, install new wires then cover up the gaping holes that they leave.
2. You do not have to close the hotel rooms during installation, so you can still make money from guests during the short installation process.

Along with a hard wired internet connection as standard with every EoC box, there are upgraded models that also have Wi-Fi built in. This gives guests a private high speed Wi-Fi connection in every room which is what gives them that vital ‘Home-away-from-home’ feel. This is of very high importance as 94% of people choose Wi-Fi as the most important feature in a hotel, yet only 64% of hotels offer it free to their customers (HotelChatter).

These little boxes come with some brilliant features:

• –Feeding IP signals into SAT, CAT 5 or headend systems
• -Master/Slave Mode: 1 Master – up to 63 endpoints
• –Wi-Fi (EoC 2-01) and Standby Mode
• –Web interface for Wi-Fi configuration

3. In-Room Mirroring and Casting

Guests can often get bored of the limited entertainment options in a hotel room compared to their own living space outside of your establishment. You can change this with one simple, slick device that will seamlessly sit behind any TV in your hotel. These clever little devices allow Screen mirroring and casting for Windows, Apple and Android devices.

Therefore, unlike other similar devices such as Apple TV, this product has no limitations. This is a very unique aspect of the SCRIPTCAST device that really sets it apart from other similar devices on the market.

4. Voice Command

Voice command is one of the newest, up and coming technologies in the hospitality Industry with it being implemented into some USA hotels but is yet to really breach into the UK market. With devices such as Alexa, Google Home and Apple’s Siri, voice command is all around us and is a big part of people life at home, and now it’s only a matter of time until it is a common feature in our Hotels.

Hotels present a massive opportunity for the use of smart home features in their establishments. Guests would be able to walk into a hotel room and ask the voice command assistant to turn the lights on, book a table for the on-site restaurant or maybe book a spa day. The possibilities are endless as the technology advances day-by-day. This will really give guests the home-away-from-home experience that they crave.

5. Smart TV

Since the introduction of Smart TVs all the way back in 2014, they are quickly becoming an essential for every home in the UK. As of 2017, 38% of all households own a Smart TV, this has increased by 10% from the previous year (Statista). This just shows that they are becoming more and more popular and very soon they will be in over 50% of UK households. Therefore, in the coming years the chances are that when a guest stays in one of your rooms, they will have a Smart TV at home and consequently will be expecting one in their hotel room.

However, we would not recommend using a domestics TV in a hotel environment for many different reasons, but there are a wide variety of Hospitality Smart TVs to choose from. The good thing about these TVs is that you can set certain restrictions on them. These restrictions range from simple settings like the Maximum volume, TV channel list and not allowing them to add or remove any apps from the Smart TV all the way up to integrating interactive TV systems into the TVs.

Most guests are not satisfied with arriving in a hotel room to find that they only have the standard channels available to them on the TVs, they are expecting a TV system that allows them to purchase amenities, late checkouts or order room service without having to pick up a phone.