Las Vegas -- At the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, all eyes were on the new breed of gadget that has the guts of a personal computer inside a sleek portable design that is simple enough to be used by anyone.
While tablet computers have been available for the better part of the last decade, touch-screen and battery technology have advanced to the point where prices have dropped and consumer adoption has soared. New devices including the Galaxy Tab, Motorola Xoom and BlackBerry PlayBook combine entertainment and productivity in one portable package, as a widening market for handheld smartphones means people will travel with more devices.
BANDWIDTH REQUIREMENTS
As Web-enabled handhelds continue their proliferation, hoteliers will have to continue to upgrade their infrastructure to cope with increased demand for Internet access.
"2010 was a defining moment and a test for us, as well as the industry, with the announcement of the Wi-Fi 3G iPad and a tremendous volume of tablets and smartphones," said Monika Nerger, VP of information technology for Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group. "With all the tablets at CES, if even half of those make it to market, soon everyone will have not just a mobile phone but a tablet device. Mandarin Oriental has been attending the show for at least a decade, since we always felt it was strategic to our planning."
To better handle guests' information requirements, Mandarin Oriental implemented infrastructure upgrades to increase the number of devices a guest can connect to the hotel's network. But bandwidth demands are increasing at such a strong rate that a far-reaching strategy to address mobile is necessary.
"We have a property in Boston where we put a large, mind-numbing amount of bandwidth in and we did it more for a marketing standpoint than a functional standpoint," said David Heckaman, VP of development in the Americas for Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group.
GUEST DEMAND WAY UP
While bandwidth prices have dropped steeply over the past few years, the rate of guest demand is increasing even more quickly than many hotels can reasonably invest in upgrades.
"When the iPad came out we were already starting to bump up against the bandwidth threshold we were expecting to reach for the entire year," Heckaman said.
The "State of the Media 2010: U.S. Audiences & Devices" study conducted by The Nielsen Co. reports there are 228-million mobile phone users in the country over the age of 13, 83.2 million of which use their phone to access the Internet when mobile. Thirty-one percent of the total mobile phone market is already comprised of smartphone users, with the iPhone 3GS as the most popular smartphone in the country.
"Clearly with so many users using mobility devices and guests walking in with laptops, one of the industry challenges is providing enough bandwidth for the peak times in hotels," said Gustaaf Schrils, VP for global technology in the Americas for InterContinental Hotels Group. "It's clear to us that mobility is eventually going to take over the large glass, as we call it, and will replace computers."
THE COST OF THE CLOUD
Schrils believes mobility can cut costs and increase efficiency for hoteliers by pushing services that are normally handled by servers located on-property to servers hosted at a remote location, a process known today as cloud computing.
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"The fact that hotels don't need to have highly skilled people on-site to manage very complicated systems is valuable," said Schrils. "When it looks simple to the user, it's more complicated on the backend and there are so many changes and upgrades that are going to be able to be done centrally. Hotels will benefit immediately instead of waiting for when an upgrade can be scheduled."
Being able to scale services so a hotel doesn't pay for systems it doesn't need also will save money. "Also you use less electricity, there is less hardware maintenance and there are multiple tactical and strategic benefits to having services in the cloud," Schrils said.
"The cloud is so big for hospitality because if we can put all that need for technology and the ability to expand dynamically out there for somebody else to manage, it is very big for brand management companies," said Kris Singleton, CIO at Kimpton Hotels. "That technical skill is lacking in internal resources, plus it puts the responsibility out onto the vendors so more vendors are going to partner with whoever is housing the data centers."
Content hosted remotely in the cloud is also compounding the bandwidth issue for guests, as they increasingly turn to content hosted online instead of using traditional hotel entertainment systems.
"People want to be connected to their content from anywhere, on any device," said Singleton. "What we're looking at in that realm is how we provide the connectivity of those devices to the guestroom television, because you have those devices and come into a property which has beautiful televisions."
Andrew Sheivachman
ASSOCIATE EDITOR
asheivachman@questex.com
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