From all of us at Acentic, we wish you, your colleagues, friends and family, a very Merry Christmas and a Happy and Prosperous New Year - Your Acentic Team

Recently, one of our customers decided against placing an interactive TV system in their four star hotel. The reason? They thought that including a flashy LED TV with a traditional channel package would be enough. It has been in the past, right? Well, in-room entertainment is changing and for a four star hotel, that LED TV is no longer enough to separate them from the budget brand competition.

Many budget brand hotels are now providing guests flashy LED TVs of their own, and on top of that are offering free Internet, something many four-stars do not provide. The result is that the in-room guest experience, with the exception of the bed and room size, is remarkably similar between the budget brand and our four star customer (well nearly, since internet in the four star hotel still costs 20 euros).

So, what can higher-end hotels do to differentiate themselves from the competition? They should embrace iTV, and soon. These days, most customers have HD iTVs with movies on demand in their homes and are expecting the same entertainment experience when they travel. We know this because we have seen an increase in guest comment cards requesting the implementation of an in-room entertainment system to complement the flashy new LED screens.

By moving away from iTV, higher-end hotels risk a failure to differentiate themselves from budget brands and a failure to keep up with the entertainment standards of their customers.  That is not a good mix.

We are thrilled to announce the opening of Acentic Asia.

Located in the iconic skyscraper Hopewell Centre in Hong Kong Island, Acentic Asia will bring Acentic’s in-room entertainment Hotel TV system and Internet connectivity technology to the Asian hospitality market, along with consulting and support. The office will serve international hotel brands and individual local properties with personalized attention to Asian market needs, such as localisation (translations), and support for local digital technology like Hong Kong’s DMB-T over coax and IP.

At the moment, there is no major player in the iTV market in Asia and the majority of the hotels do not have a digital iTV system or even provide digital TV services to their rooms. This is an opportunity for hotels to gain a competitive advantage by offering their guests today’s connected lifestyle.

Hong Kong, here we come!

For some of our non-hotel industry readers this may come as a surprise but High Definition is finally entering the hotel room on a large scale. The largest roll out currently underway is in the UK with one Group deploying HD in over 10,000 rooms. The hotel industry has been a keen promoter of proven technology hanging on to CRTs and analogue TV for as long as possible. The move to LCDs and HD, it was hoped, would put an end to the array of scathing comments in the guest complaint cards about snow on the TV and televisions the size of postage stamps. Adding LCDs and HD to hotel rooms has not only been saving considerable paper (for the guest comments) but it's been increasing usage of the TV screens as well as VoD with dramatic revenue growth for hotels. Just as Acentic expected. What we hadn’t expected was the increase in room service demands, which can be linked to the introduction of  the new HD systems. It seems that people are hanging out in their rooms more often these days to catch up on high definition television and movies and what goes better with that than late night cheeseburgers? Our apologies to the hotel chefs who have seen their work load increase. If we add our High Speed Internet Access platform and mobile applications, which are now enabling guests to roam within the hotel with their mobile devices, it’s not just in-room dining that will have increased.

One of the best parts of my job is staying in hotels and understanding the different approaches with which hotel staff communicate with their guests. Such a key part of the guest experience, one that hoteliers spend large amounts of time and money on, is training staff to adopt an attitude that ensures that guests feel welcomed, looked after and recognized. No matter how much training and money the hotel puts into the staff, it doesn’t replace the natural ability of certain human beings to communicate their warmth to other people. Add to that the memory of an elephant, and a hotel has the perfect employee. I recently walked into a property in which I hadn’t, to my regret, set foot in for over twelve months. I was pleasantly surprised when the barman clearly remembered me and even more astonishingly my name and immediately made me feel as if I was in a warm protective environment.

So to the barman of the Bel Ami hotel in Paris (sorry, try as I might, I just don’t have the same memory for names) - many thanks for making me feel welcomed and looked after. Whilst technology will never replace a human interaction, we continuously strive to make our products interact in a natural way with guests, becoming a seamless part of their in-room activity.

As additional content sources, viewing devices and delivery methods are introduced and quickly adopted by consumers, the various players along the chain must come up with flexible and creative solutions to answer market demands. Content is no longer consumed within the defined borders of the PayTV ecosystem, but via a wide variety of platforms and systems. Soon enough, these new trends will infiltrate and spread from the household to the hotel entertainment industry.

For 2011, we at Acentic have chosen to reflect upon a few New Year resolutions for the in-room entertainment industry, aiming to enhance service offering and entertainment experience for hotel guests.

Reviewing the numerous means by which content is delivered and retrieved by consumers, we find a few common factors that would leverage this experience regardless of content source, or viewing device:

• Ensure service continuity – deliver a consistent high quality of content, no matter which device or content source is utilized. One of the most important factors of user satisfaction from the in-room entertainment provided is the variety and quality of content served.   
• Provide rich and relevant functionality – enable guests to do as much as possible through the in-room system, and enrich this offering with relevant targeted local content. This can be achieved via integrating Digital TV services with targeted banners and promotions for local businesses, restaurants and cultural events.
• Offer intuitive interface – As families, business travelers and other guests frequent your hotel, they do not need to be burdened with learning how to operate the entertainment system from scratch each time. Middleware/UI providers need to ensure that the graphic and textual language used is intuitive and fun. Most guests arriving to their hotel room are either on vacation, or right after their work day has ended. Offer them the luxury to relax and enjoy entertainment.

As a leading supplier of digital interactive TV (iTV) and broadband systems for the hotel industry, we constantly seek and explore entertainment trends, to provide the most functional and engaging experience for hotel guests, while at the same time enable lucrative opportunities for hotel owners. Market trends are not necessarily specific to the hotel industry, and we therefore continuously look at the Digital TV and new media markets to learn and identify consumer trends and introduce them to our industry.

We recently read a blog post where the author was commenting on people’s ignorance with Wi-Fi and its installation as well as ongoing maintenance costs.
We’ve all overheard people talk about how inexpensive the Wi-Fi in their home is compared to what they pay when they are in a hotel. Listening to such statements we can only assume that most of them tend to forget all parameters that are included in the so called “free” Wi-Fi. They forget that they are paying for line rental, that they are using a consumer line which sees bandwidth drop drastically during peak times, that the consumer modem with built in Wi-Fi needs regular rebooting and that when all the kids and their multiple Wi-Fi devices connect the whole set up comes crashing down. All of which would be a disaster if it happened to a guest in a hotel. Obviously some will turn to their 3G card but when they’ve roamed once or twice they soon realize that the hotel broadband is pretty good value. Even more so if you take the following into account.
A hotel must use a professional (Enterprise Solution) router, which comes with a price tag approaching £1,000 or more, (or in other words, over twice the average personal computer). Wireless access points that work, well, they’re around £300. Depending on construction quality of a hotel and the structure itself (old thick walls, various annexes, separate adjoining buildings etc.), a Wi-Fi system can cost tens of thousands of pounds in equipment alone.
Then there is the challenging installation procedure required in a working hotel environment. The hotel needs to get cabling to these access points and you guessed it, more installation costs courtesy of a qualified cable contractor.
The key is that it SHOULD WORK, not some of the time but all of the time, particularly if your guests are paying for the service. Those complaining of poor signal/quality are likely to be in hotels using cheap products or with insufficient access points, or where connection speeds are too slow because the bandwidth is too small. And of course, Wi-Fi maintenance is not something that takes care of itself either.
So next time you get upset about not having Free Wi-Fi, think about this – a quality product or service that consistently delivers doesn’t come for free!

Instead of boring you with more Iceland ash jokes and airport tales of woe I am thinking positively about airports and hotels. Whilst waiting for news and fielding calls from my staff that they finally reached their destination, I realised why I love this job after 20 years in the hotel industry. I love the camaraderie. It doesn’t matter who you work for; hotelier, cleaner, supplier, consultant, it is times like these when the industry shows its strength under stress against all adversity.

Acentic staff members that were stranded in airports and hotels have told me their stories of outstanding service, especially in relation to turnaround times and “feeding the masses”. As for these hotel services, our quick thinking German operations are also part of the team. When this crisis broke, our NOC deployed additional overtime coverage to monitor the systems, especially our 40K rooms with High Speed Internet Access, which we knew would take a hammering these past weeks. I am exceptionally proud of my staff’s well-played part (while working quietly in the background 24/7) to produce a 99.3% digital services uptime!

Speaking of airports I was recently reading an article about world’s “best” airport (Votes were calculated before the whole air transport crash due to the volcano) http://ehotelier.com/hospitality-news/item.php?id=D18363_0_11_0_M, and it made me recall the hours I spent in each of them, using their unique facilities. Indeed Acentic has its systems installed in Hotels at all of the European hotels in the  top 10 of this list!

Understanding the customers’ needs in order to optimise products and services is what this industry is all about and what adds value to our business! Working with our hotel customers is certainly the best job in the world, keep it up team!

Travel safely.

Last week I visited the International Hotel Investment Forum in Berlin where this year’s theme was "Charting the course for intelligent growth"… Splendid!

I attended sessions that discussed the value of the brand and process and offering standardization…(We do like processes when things are tough … “that’s why it’s all gone wrong. You didn’t stick to the processes”). I met with members of the finance community who thought that the “hotel industry just isn’t appealing enough for our money at the moment.” (their money?).

In the hope of seeing for myself the course for intelligent growth, I attended the session entitled “Best practice to survive the downturn and take advantage of the upturn” which I must say, I thoroughly enjoyed. One of the panellists had some wise words. He stated that the Hotel industry has never been a three to five-year cycle in which to make returns, it has always been a long-term business in which you need to hold over two cycles lasting about 15 years and the industry needs to find lenders who will stick around! Very true, I thought, but good luck with that one!

It was in this session that it struck me that any current successes lie in process improvement, refinancing, cutting costs, outsourcing, etc. But there was not one mention of PEOPLE.
When we are all growing at a zillion miles per hour, it’s because we have the best people. Here is what you hear: “It’s our people that make the difference“. ”We put people first”. “You buy our products, you buy our people”. But when it all goes belly up, it’s the market, the recession, the bankers, the last thing we are going to do is spend a penny on those costly employees.

“It’s only about people in the good times”. That must change, it must always be about the people in the good times or bad times.

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.