At Mobile World Congress this year in Barcelona, there were many new ideas centered around making your mobile life better. Some of them had the cool factor, from an interface from Swedish TAT which lets you identify a person’s face via your phone camera and deliver not only profile information about that person but also show you their latest status updates, to green mobile technology such as MyFC which makes fuels cells and chargers so you can charge any mobile or laptop, extending the battery life of your portable device.

Then we saw it. The lifestyle technology that we knew we would see in hotel rooms next. We know we will see it because for the past decade, hoteliers have been transforming their hotel rooms into more of what the guest is used to at home. From the way we search for content on TV and surf for movies, to the lighting around the bed versus the lighting around the work spaces – hotels have been creating a lifestyle experience. You see companies like Philips creating a new dynamic around mood lighting in hotel rooms, TV’s that feel like they belong in our living rooms, and Acentic which creates the technology giving you access to programming and content that parallels how we interact with our computer.

So what is this new discovery that  completes the lifestyle experience of the guest? The furniture. Now if you combine the furniture with our busy mobile lifestyles and the hectic pace of the business traveller then the lifestyle technology we saw at Mobile World Congress is just what hoteliers will be doing next. A Finnish company, Powerkiss www.powerkiss.com has said goodbye to the cables that go along with charging your portable devices including mobile phones. Their solution – work with furniture manufacturers and imbed a charging device into the furniture. All the guest has to do is attach  a pin into the device and place it on the furniture with the device built in and the mobile phone charges automatically. No more need for cables or for adaptors that don’t work anyway.

Technology has moved away from just code and software to practical applications that make your life better in a more direct way when you are away from home. 

Guest blogger: Jennifer Hicks, Founder , ink Communications, marketing consultant, Acentic

I attended a hospitality IT conference this week curious to find out about the latest happenings and the hot topics. A couple of old favorites appeared to take-over. The first was, of course, about the value of the in-room telephone, its migration to IP, the revenue generating opportunities it may bring and the great functionality these IP digital phones have. Well, 4 years down the road and still no one has presented a valid business case with actual usage statistics. I wonder if we aren’t beating a dead horse? 3DTV was of course discussed but again how many of you have it at home? Hotels still have to roll out SD and HDTV to hotel rooms before we can start thinking about 3DTV. A vote was held to understand how many guests made real use of all the technology in the room. If my memory serves correct, the general agreement was that for an investment to be really worthwhile a 60% usage rate was necessary. That figure rules out the hotel restaurant, bar and fitness area! In fact, such a usage rate rules out just about everything except the bed and the television system which tend to hit 100% of usage providing those that do use the bar manage to make their way back to their room.

The plenary session was our friend Mr. Levy from Citizen M.  He highlighted how important it was to understand what the guest wants and then look at the technology. He stressed, this was the order, NOT the other way around. Imposing technology upon guests simply does not work. Instead we should all look at what mainstream consumers use everyday (not us techie geeks, but REAL consumers). They all use their bed, they all use their TV and from the incredible figures we see from TV operators around the planet they increasingly use non-linear or On Demand TV. They do not use expensive interactive IP phones at home and they rarely connect their laptops to their TV screen in the living room. In the future I would suggest that hotel technology conferences should follow Acentic’s Sales Rule number 20: “Keep your PowerPoint slides bloody simple.”

As I read an article on “wired” families I am fascinated about our seemingly never ending thirst for more technology and bandwidth, did you know that the average bandwidth cost per American household in just under USD 1,000 per annum on TV, Internet and Gaming (then plus another USD 1,000 for mobiles) that’s across every single household; and Cornell University is quoted as saying “... it is what is expected for people to be functional in society.” (NYTimes 10/02/10) http://nyti.ms/bOZesQ

I reflect on two recent very different Hotel front desk experiences. Both fabulous 5 star hotels.

Hotel A: Traditional including lengthy queue (15 minutes each way) for friendly check-in and check-out and analogue TV services.
Hotel B: Check-in in normal friendly manner with offer of check-out at the desk or by kiosk (less than 5 minutes each way) with a friendly staff to assist concurrent users and High Definition TV services in the room.

So one hotel “wired” and one hotel “un-wired” both different and assumed both successful.

Need help getting “wired” ? Drop us a line 24/7.

We are happy to announce that we have entered into a strategic partnership with WAYS TECH S.r.l., the Italian IT infrastructure provider for some of Italy’s best hotels and financial institutions. This partnership will allow us to increase the level of service to your guests and staff to better serve our hotels as a single source for digital TV and high speed internet access (HSIA) for the hotel guest room. The Milan-based WAYS TECH Hospitality Solutions will combine strategic direction, with the hands-on service that WAYS TECH provides, together with the former Acentic Italy staff and most importantly the team of over 20 site engineers and account managers carefully located throughout Italy.

Our new venture with WAYS TECH will combine our technology with the Italian best in class service standards of WAYS TECH.

With all the growth in 2010 for Acentic, we are pleased to announce the strengthened relationship with WAYS TECH. This investment allows us to continue to extend our digital TV and HSIA services to offer a broader product portfolio to our existing Europe customers as well as expand to Asia and the Middle East.

We have opened our Middle East office. We have 17 new colleagues at the headquarters and 50 colleagues total spread across the affiliated regions. We are pleased to welcome the Middle East office and its co-workers under the direction of Rene Mieritz and Prem Kumar to the Acentic team.

The Acentic Middle East team are now being trained on Acentic technology at company headquarters in Cologne, Germany in order to launch the our new Panorama IP In-room Hotel Entertainment Platform dedicated to the Middle East by Q2, 2010. Currently we are bringing these new colleagues into the company and helping them to learn Acentic’s business, technology as well as the 20 rules for success.  This new team is already easily exemplifying Rule #9: Know and live the Acentic brand story.  The new addition to our company fully responds to our expectations of system sales and especially the personalised after sales service, as this is one main aspect of what differentiates us in the market.

Through this joint venture we plan to extend the success of Panorama HD and IP to hotels across the Middle East. The new office will be led by Rene Mieritz and Prem Kumar, Directors of Acentic Middle East, providing corporate and commercial expertise with over two decades of business experience in the hotel industry in the Middle East. For the Acentic Management team and myself, this is a new defining exciting chapter in the evolution of Acentic, the leading provider of HD TV to Hotels in EMEA.

I was in the city today with one of those finance types... seriously though a very knowledgeable, hard working and successful lady who travels a lot and expects a level of service and is prepared to pay for service. Her question was simple:” Why do my favourite hotels have the most luxurious beds with soft snugly linen sheets, a mountain of pillows to chose from and bathroom amenities that would please any man or woman and yet I have to pay to watch a film on a Sunday night on an old TV screen?”.

Sadly she saw it as “my” [sic] Acentic's fault... In Europe last year only 7% of 4/5 star hotels upgraded their TV screens and content systems. Our industry sector remains plagued by the legacy of “free TV screens for charging for adult content” clearly this is archaic which I have never supported as a sustainable guest service.

I implore any hotelier reading this to ensure that they forward budget for full HD screens and quality HD content management end to end in order that the guest TV experience is equal to the luxurious linen and amenities experience that we all enjoy!

I have been leaving things in hotel rooms for 25 years and my experience is, that unless you go back straight away, you never ever get them back. However, my sincere thanks goes to the Holiday Inn on the Cromwell Road London who had my 3 ties and tie wallet two days after I left the hotel. I phoned the hotel and when put through to security, I was met with a voicemail service. My heart sunk as I left my message because I knew, just like every other time, that was the end of my ties!
Shock horror but within an hour the head of security phoned me and said that he had the ties and I should call him before coming to the hotel and he would meet me in reception with them. And that is exactly what happened. Great service! I have told a dozen people this story and if I ever leave something in a hotel again, it will be the Holiday Inn on the Cromwell Road.

But it’s not just me. A recent survey carried out amongst 30 Novotel Hotels revealed that guests leave very unusual things in hotel rooms (as well as ending up naked in corridors on a regular basis). Items found by housekeeping were fake limbs, a snake, arrest warrants, false teeth, (you wouldn’t go back would you!) a baby (was reclaimed) a two metre high statue and a riding crop under the pillow…really. http://tinyurl.com/smh-hotelroom

In the same survey, women were found to be the messiest, watch more adult movies than 10 years ago and chocolate remains their number one minibar item…hmmm. One Novotel reported a story of a guest calling reception to ask the duty manager to help get his vegetables out of the microwave. As the hotel doesn’t have microwaves the duty manager went to find the vegetables locked in the safe…I love this business!

And finally…it’s all about Holiday Inn this week. In today’s news they have announced a “Human Bed Warming Service“. So before you tuck in for the night, a member of staff attends the room with a full body fleece and lies in your bed to get it to 20-24 degrees, the appropriate temperature in which to doze off according to the sleep consultant…I’ve applied for a Saturday job! http://tinyurl.com/HumanBedWarming 

Except for the lucky ones amongst you who live under warmer climates many of you will have been battling the elements in this new year as snow and ice hits most of Europe. Whilst some countries seem to contend extremely well with harsh winters I recently experienced the joys of an airport seemingly unable to clear 10cm of snow from its runaways. A three hour wait in the airport followed by a two an half hour wait inside the plane allowed me to get on with my work thanks to those fantastic laptop batteries our IT department issue to our road warriors. Gone are the days where you would work for an hour and then dash off to the bar because the battery was flat. And as my laptop battery level reached dangerously the zero minute mark we were promptly disembarked and told to fend for ourselves, ah the joys of low cost airlines. With all airport hotels overflowing found a train into town and then trudged through the snow to the nearest hotel arriving shivering, wet and disheartened. And then hospitality took over- a warm welcome at reception, some genuine sympathy, a great room with a comfortable bed, a good meal with an excellent smiling service and a life saving beer. Followed by a fuzzy TV picture, an extremely limited number of TV channels and a few out of date movies. Interesting how that fantastic experience and great work by the staff can be marred by a lackluster in-room experience.

Acentic has just celebrated its sixth Christmas as a company and this year's present from Santa was by far, the best yet. Two days before Christmas a delivery arrived in the form of a binding offer to buy a controlling stake in Acentic from ISM Communications Corporation (ISM) and Philweb Communications (WEB).

These two public companies listed on the Philippine Stock Exchange have joined with Niantic Holding, a German company controlled by Dr. Andreas Jacobs, to invest in Acentic to further extend our technology offering throughout EMEA and launch Acentic Asia to serve the Asia and MiddleEast markets.

According to Lodging Economics’ latest Asia Pacific Pipeline Report http://tinyurl.com/China-India-HotelConstruction the Asia Pacific hotel pipeline is the second largest in the world and this region has two of the fastest growing economies in the World, China and India, with more than 208,847 hotel rooms in the pipeline in China alone.

We are very excited about our new owners as they have vast experience in our field. Not only are they the previous founders and owners of one of World's largest hotel technology providers but clearly can also spot talent (hee-hee) and their current businesses are in the field of IT and gaming.

Our current product offering of Digital TV services, High Speed Connectivity and Worldwide media and content is currently in Hotels belonging to virtually all of the major global brands and now having the opportunity to support their needs further afield is very exciting indeed.

We’re looking forward to the changes and growth this new dynamic brings to the Acentic family in 2010 and beyond. As a company that has always been dedicated to customer service and quality products, we are still dedicated to keeping our hotels happy and helping them deliver the best in room services possible to their guests.

We have just come out of the noughties, so what is this decade called? The teenies? The booming teens…. (let’s be positive) the twenty tens?

Whatever. There is much to look forward to: We have the football World Cup, always good for anyone’s business, the Winter Olympics, the Ryder Cup, Andy Murray is going to win his first major and Scotland will win the six nations. You don’t get much more positive than that to me.

There are some great films to look forward too as well. Wall Street 2 (as mentioned in a previous blog), Up in the Air with George Clooney, Robin Hood with Russell Crowe (yawn!), the final books of Harry Potter and Gulliver’s Travels with Billy Connolly….yeehaaa.

It’s at this time of year that I, and I suppose many other managers in my position, need to galvanize our teams and launch them into the new year with confidence, optimism and a sense of fun. My first award of the year and “Cool Friend of Acentic” goes to Emily Somers. Emily works for the Glove division of Medline and created, choreographed and directed the attached film, which was created to promote awareness for breast cancer in a hospital in Portland, Oregon. When the site gets a million hits, Medline will give a large contribution to the hospital and free mammograms to the community.

To persuade everyday people do extraordinary things is inspiring. I invite you to do the Pink Glove Dance and be inspired.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEdVfyt-mLw