Streamlined Building Management Systems for Hotels and Hospitality
The reputation of a hotel depends on two contradictory things: things guests notice, and things they hopefully never think about. Features like a great restaurant, a warm pool, luxurious suites, and outstanding customer service can help you stand out and offer memorable experiences. But other things that only become noticeable—and memorable— when things go wrong, like air conditioning that doesn’t work or bathrooms that haven’t been cleaned can have greater impact on the guest experience than the good stuff. No guest has ever left a review that a room was at the right temperature, but plenty have left reviews when it wasn’t.
Facility managers in the hotel and hospitality industry have to make sure that building systems enhance guest comfort while keeping costs in check. A building management system for hotels that integrates smart technologies and analytics can help you balance these needs by streamlining operations, improving energy efficiency, and creating better experiences for guests.
The Importance of Better Guest Experiences
In the past, hotel brands built their reputations over years to garner customer loyalty. Online reviews have changed that. Now, reputations can change seemingly overnight and have to be maintained day by day, guest by guest.
Surveys have shown:
72% value guest ratings over brand
32% won’t stay in hotels with fewer than 4-star ratings
88% won’t stay in hotels with lower than 3-star rating
79% of guests are more likely to book a room with a higher rating (all other things being equal)
What factors go into these ratings?
Customer Service
Amenities
Comfort (heat, water quality)
Technology (Wi-Fi, enough chargers, smart technology)
Safety and health concerns (cleanliness, air quality)
All of these can be improved through technology.
Enhancing the Guest Experience
Let’s take a closer look at the five areas that drive hotel ratings and how they can be improved.
Customer Service
Hiring and training procedures go a long way. But giving your employees the tools to quickly check people in, take room service orders, respond quickly to any requests, and communicate with each other can take you even further. Those are the behind-the-scenes uses of technology that support customer service excellence.
Amenities
High-quality amenities like restaurants, business centers, gyms, and pools can set you apart. Ensuring these are operating seamlessly is essential to providing great guest experiences.
Comfort
Ideally, guests never have to think about heating or cooling. But in reality, thermal discomfort is a common complaint, particularly if hotels are using standardized settings or time-based automation. Smart climate control can change that and ensure guests stay comfortable.
Technology
Keyless entry and touchless check-in are critical in a post-pandemic world. But even before the pandemic began, fast, reliable Wi-Fi, charging stations for devices and electric cars, and guest service apps were becoming standard in many hotels. As nice-to-haves become must-haves, introducing these technologies will be necessary to keep guests coming back.
Safety and Health
Safety has long been a concern for hotel guests, leading to the proliferation of smart locks and automatic lights across the industry. But in the past year, safety has taken on a different meaning. Guests want to know that the environment itself is safe. Is the air clean? Are surfaces sanitized? Installing air purification systems, HEPA filters, and air quality monitoring systems, using 100% outdoor air, and maintaining a consistent schedule of rigorous cleaning are important steps toward creating safer indoor environments that protect guest health.
While all of these improvements can be vital to keeping guests happy, hotel owners and facility managers are often concerned about the cost of deploying new technologies and their potential impact on energy consumption. But with the right strategy, the technologies that enhance guest experiences can also improve energy efficiency and transform operations.
The Value of Integration
Hotels rely on complex networks of equipment and devices to keep things running smoothly. Unifying these systems in an integrated building management system for hotels can give you greater visibility into what is happening in your building and opens up opportunities for improvement. When smart IoT sensors and analytics are added, that system gains powerful new capabilities.
An advanced analytics platform continuously collects, organizes, and prioritizes data from all connected building systems. A platform with machine learning (ML) capabilities can continuously mine this data to learn how your building operates and make automatic adjustments based on both actual and predicted conditions. This means that rooms can be preheated in anticipation of occupancy, ventilation can increase as restaurants fill up, and lights can be dimmed when sunlight fills the lobby. As the platform continues to learn over time, predictions become more accurate and adjustments become even more precise.
When building functions are driven by real-world variables and adapt to changing conditions in real time, hotels automatically become more responsive to guest needs. But it also makes buildings more efficient, as energy is used only when and where it is needed. As part of a smart hotel energy management system, analytics can have a meaningful impact on your bottom line and help you reduce costs without sacrificing guest comfort.
Smarter Maintenance
A smart integrated building management system for hotels can change how building systems function. But it can also change how those systems are maintained.
Typically, hotel maintenance teams perform maintenance checks on a set schedule. If something seems to be going wrong, it will be fixed. If nothing seems wrong, nothing happens but the service team still logs the visit. And if something goes wrong just after a maintenance check, chances are it won’t be caught until it has a noticeable impact on guests.
An analytics platform with advanced fault detection and diagnostics allows maintenance teams to avoid time-based maintenance checks and work more effectively.
- Because the platform continuously monitors equipment, anomalies can be detected immediately—including those that a routine inspection might miss and long before problems affect guests.
- Alarms are prioritized, ensuring you are only notified when necessary.
- The platform can make automatic adjustments to correct minor issues, eliminating the need for manual intervention.
- When manual intervention is needed, the platform can offer insights and make recommendations to help you isolate and resolve the problem quickly.
Not only does this allow you to prevent major malfunctions and downtime that compromise guest comfort, it also helps you detect suboptimal performance as soon as possible. By taking swift corrective action, you can eliminate waste caused by underperforming equipment before it affects your energy bills.
Increasing Safety & Transparency
Automation is an invaluable part of building management, but some things still require a human touch. Perhaps nowhere is that more evident than in hotel cleaning.
To help travelers feel safe in a post-Covid world, hotels are highlighting their sanitation efforts in both guest rooms and shared spaces. Cleaning practices have become a selling point. But to create a robust health and safety strategy that puts your guests at ease, you need real-time visibility into cleaning and sanitation in all parts of your building. BuiltSpace offers an innovative solution.
With BuiltSpace:
QR codes can be attached to any surfaces you want to track
Staff can scan the QR code when cleaning has been completed
Work can be verified with pictures
This data can be shared with stakeholders—including facilities managers, cleaning crews, and even guests—via the BuiltSpace app. That means that you can go beyond promises; you can offer objective data to give your guests peace of mind.
The Best Building Management System for Hotels
Creating an integrated building management system for hotels can have extraordinary benefits for guests, staff, and building owners. Realizing these benefits, however, requires more than keeping up with technology—you need a partner who is at the forefront of building tech.
Buildings IOT offer cutting-edge services and products to design and deploy smart building management systems. Our master systems integration teams can unify all new and legacy systems using a powerful integration engine to allow for seamless communication throughout your network. Our mobile-first analytics platform, onPoint, provides actionable insights, single-pane-of-glass control, and advanced automation capabilities that transform the way your building functions.