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!