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.”