Debate Over The Phone’s Fate
Can the guestroom telephone evolve and reclaim relevance, or is it destined for extinction?
By Adam Kirby, Associate Editor -- Hotels, 8/31/2008 11:00:00 PM
|
In HITEC’s Guestroom 2010, a model hotel room full of futuristic prototypes and high-priced electronics, sat an almost comical anachronism—an intercom unit that looked like it was purchased for a few dollars at an antique store. The dusty relic occupied a spot on the bedside table that normally would have been taken up by a landline telephone, which was nowhere to be found.
Indeed, some industry observers, including the majority of the hospitality technology consultants that make up the Guestroom 2010 advisory committee, see the phone itself as just as outdated as the antique intercom that served as its Guestroom 2010 placeholder.
“There was lots of reaction,” says Jules Sieburgh of O’Neal Consultants, who served as the chief technology integrator for this year’s incarnation of Guestroom 2010. “We got the reaction we were looking for. Sometimes you need something controversial.”
With so many travelers nowadays shunning the guestroom phone in favor of mobile phones, Skype and even e-mail, Sieburgh and the committee decided that the phone—as we currently think of it, anyway—will be relegated to history within a matter of years. There will certainly be some kind of communications device in the room—hence the presence of the old intercom—but exactly what will emerge is anybody’s guess.
Defenders of the phone’s future—product vendors and manufacturers most vociferously, but also some consultants and hoteliers—point to safety as the biggest reason the phone will never go away. The argument goes that even if the phone is never used for anything else, the ability to quickly and confidently contact emergency responders must always be present, and it would be irresponsible to assume that all travelers will have a functioning mobile phone.
“The phone needs to be there for emergencies and older guests,” says Philip Taylor, director of marketing for Swisscom Hospitality Services North America.
Emergency calling is a legitimate point of concern, concedes Sieburgh, but he says it is “totally overblown.” While there needs to be some form of in-room communications device in the future, he says it is unimaginative to assume that it will have to be a phone.
GPS devices already enable transmission of pinpoint coordinates, and that technology could be integrated into other devices like the television, a wall-mounted intercom or the coming wave of guestroom automation system controllers. All mobile phones will have GPS capability in the future—many already do—and if mobiles eventually achieve complete market penetration, the emergency response concern could be rendered moot.
|
|
|
|
Taylor concedes that such a “panic button” concept is technologically viable down the road, but wonders whether it will make financial sense to reconfigure guestrooms for a system that could cost more and would serve roughly the same purpose as an existing PBX.
That said, new-build properties of the future—especially those market-positioned as ultra-modern—may choose to shun phones in favor of alternate communications devices. “But that’s at least seven years out,” Taylor says, “because now Baby Boomers are traveling for leisure, and if you give them a fancy gizmo and they have a heart attack, they’re not going to want to crawl across the room and try to figure out the panic button on a flat-panel television.”
If the guestroom phone does survive in some form—at least for the foreseeable future—a decade from now, will its primary function still be placing calls?
As long as a phone has to be at the bedside, Bryson Koehler, IHG’s vice president of revenue and guest technology, sees it evolving into a sort of all-purpose room control system.
“Let’s not add more new things to the hotels,” Koehler says. “Let’s take existing boxes and servers and add to and extend them.”
That could mean having Internet-connected voice-over-IP (VOIP) phones serve as the bridge point between interactive TV and a hotel’s property management system, or perhaps as a signal point with RFID or Bluetooth compatibility to recognize a guest and instantly activate his or her customized room settings.
“Is the phone that base station that becomes, at the end of the day, that hidden computing system in the room?” Koehler wonders.
The VOIP Voyage
To a large degree, the plethora of vendors touting VOIP as the savior of hotel phone revenues are hoping that is indeed where the technology is headed. The sales and marketing opportunities afforded by IP phones with interactive touch-screen panels are well-documented—and once various tariff issues are ironed out, international calls will cost pennies, meaning potentially higher profit margins for hotels—but the units themselves are increasingly looking as much like notebook computers as phones.
Alcatel-Lucent’s Bluetooth-equipped 4068 IP Touch product, recently installed across the Hampshire Hotels & Resorts portfolio, features a high-resolution color display with Web-based XML applications, plus a Blackberry-style keyboard for Skype users.
Similarly, Mitel’s 5570 media assistant phone includes a screen with 30-frames-per-second capacity that, once it launches later this year, will be marketed as an additional content and advertising delivery system for hotels.
“When you go on a Web site and you pull up a live feed for a sporting event via your PC, it gets preceded by an advertisement,” says Mike Poloni, director of business development and marketing for Mitel’s U.S. hospitality division. “We’re being conditioned for targeted marketing, so why wouldn’t we do that for the phone? It’s not interfering with the phone in any way, it’s just providing more information.”
Despite such functionality, the long-term viability of VOIP phones remains open to debate. Sieburgh doubts most travelers will choose to use small, touch-screen phone panels to order roomservice when they could instead use the comparatively large TV display.
“You don’t have enough real estate to work with” on a VOIP phone touch-screen, Sieburgh says. “The real information tool within the guestroom will be the television. People know how to use a remote—it’s large real estate and it’s navigable.”
Koehler, of IHG, likewise sees such technology as a temporary fix. “The phone has reached the end of its useful life. Putting a 5-inch (13-cm) LCD on it—that’s super cool, but it doesn’t help. That’s nothing more than putting a snooze button on it.”
And as videoconferencing becomes more common in the future, the TV may actually make more sense for placing phone calls. “Don’t be surprised if the voice-over-IP (migrates) to the TV,” Sieburgh says.
Even housekeepers of the future will use the TV as their primary communications device, predicts Swisscom’s Taylor. In the same way that many hotels already allow guests to checkout via TV, housekeepers could do the same with placing a room back into service, he says.
Still, even critics like Sieburgh see an interim period of usefulness for VOIP phones. Handsets with sharp video capability and attached keyboard functionality could bridge the gap between current technology and the theoretical VOIP-integrated televisions of the future.
“Short-term, that might have some viability,” Sieburgh says, “but long-term, (phone vendors) need to merge with a TV company and figure out how to do it.”
Consider Transparent Pricing
Too often, the cost of a call from a guestroom phone ranks as a great hotel mystery. Guests know that placing a call may result in a relatively costly charge, but the exact pricing structure is typically opaque. And yet even with the proliferation of mobile phones there remains a desire among some guests for the crystal-clear reception of a landline telephone. Perhaps if guests knew exactly what a call was going cost, more might pick up the handset.
That’s certainly the thinking at Mitel, which is working on a new guestroom phone that lets users enter a phone number and see the call’s cost displayed on the phone, giving them the opportunity to proceed or to cancel the transaction. The cost of the call is updated each minute, and at the end of the call, the phone displays the amount that will be charged to the room.
The Mitel technology is ready to launch, and while no hotel groups have officially signed on for the new system, hospitality technology leaders like Nick Price of Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group have been calling for that sort of technology for several years.
The Mitel system could be a way for hotels to turn the tables on guest cell phone use, particularly for international travelers who have no idea what a call will cost them on their mobile phones in any given city.
“If the hotel can demonstrate fair pricing, I think the hotel has a very successful chance of bringing people back to the hotel phone, because it is superior telephony,” says Price, Mandarin Oriental’s chief technology officer.
Guestroom Mobile Phones
Maybe the future of the hotel phone as a revenue source lies not with landline handsets but with embracing the mobile revolution. For instance, Xium Wireless offers Concierge Phone Service, wherein guests are given the option of renting a mobile phone that can receive and place international calls at reduced rates, and participating hotels get a cut of the revenue.
Then there is The Peninsula Tokyo, which is pioneering technology that essentially results in guestroom phone/mobile phone hybrids. At the hotel, wired guestroom phones can be synchronized with guests’ mobiles to automatically transfer incoming calls to any handset in the room. Additionally, each room has a portable phone that functions anywhere within the hotel as an in-room phone, and, upon leaving the property, converts to a mobile phone for outgoing calls within the metropolitan area.
Whatever becomes of the hotel phone in the future, there will almost certainly be fewer of them per guestroom. Mobil, AAA and the spate of other hotel ratings agencies are in the process of reviewing outdated guidelines that require hotels to install multiple phones in guestrooms in order to achieve top scores.
Between guests’ own mobile phones and the commonality of cordless phones in the rooms, additional phones in bathrooms or on nightstands have transitioned from luxury items to being superfluous.
Direct comments to: adam.kirby@reedbusiness.com
| VENDORS | ||
| (This is not a complete list of telecommunications providers.) | ||
| Alcatel-Lucent alcatel-lucent.com | ||
| Avaya avaya.com | ||
| BAXL Technologies baxl.net | ||
| Bittel USA bittelusa.com | ||
| Cisco Systems cisco.com | ||
| Golden Telecom goldentelecom.com | ||
| Guest-Tek Interactive guest-tek.com | ||
| Innovation Technologies innovationtw.com | ||
| Inn-Phone inn-phone.com | ||
| Locatel locatel.fr | ||
| Matrix Networks matrixnetworks.com | ||
| Mitel mitel.com | ||
| NEC Unified Solutions necunified.com | ||
| NewCom International newcom-intl.com | ||
| Nevotek nevotek.com | ||
| Nortel nortel.com | ||
| PhoneSuite phonesuite.com | ||
| Pinnacle Communications pinnaclecommunications.com | ||
| Polycom polycom.com | ||
| Resource Technology Management rtm-inc.com | ||
| Siemens siemens.com | ||
| Swisscom swisscom.com | ||
| Teledex teledex.com | ||
| TeleMatrix telematrixusa.com | ||
| Thing5 thing5.com | ||
| Xeta Technologies xeta.com | ||
| Xium Wireless xiuminc.com | ||
No related content found.
