|
|
 |
|
|
 |
|
 |
|
• Tracking Emerging Technology – Interview with Douglas Rice, HTNG • Knowing The Guest – Interview with Nick Price, Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group • When Hotels Lead the Way – Interview with Fraser Hickox, Peninsula Group
IN-ROOM ENTERTAINMENT
• Pacific Media Predicts Rapid Growth for Hospitality HDTV Sales • The TV of the Future • Internet TV ‘Gold Rush’ • Deuromedia Interactive Platform – Interview with Markus Hiebeler, Deuromedia • Licence to Screen • MCOM, First to offer a VC-1/MPEG4 IPTV platform with a VOD multilingual subtitling service to the hospitality industry... – Interview with Costas Sakellariou, Media Communications • Convergence – In Room Centric Trends in Hotel Technologies – The vision of a market leader • Meeting New Guest Entertainment Demands The Trends – Interview with Ian Crabb, Quadriga Worldwide Ltd • Massive Roll-out for Genesis System – Interview with Myron Tataryn, Quadriga Worldwide Ltd • CASE STUDY – A Taste of Genesis • Quadriga Worldwide Ltd Key Figures • NxTV First of Kind to Earn HTNG Certification for Guest Itinerary Display on Hotel Televisions • CASE STUDY – Trump International Hotel & Tower Chicago Installs Next Generation HD IP Video on Demand Entertainment Services • The Shift from Pay TV Provider to Veritable “Media Partner” – Interview with Tonio Fruehauf, Premiere Hotel Entertainment • CASE STUDY – Surprising Guests with Simplicity, Quality and Quantity (of channels) • One Step Beyond!!... – Interview with Patrick Goubet, ArtDisplay • Strength, Security and Aesthetics
COMMUNICATION TECNOLOGIES
• IP PABX: Stepping into the Future – A White Paper by Percipia, Inc. • Virtual Private Networks • Wireless Phones for Staff – a Key to Improved Service • CASE STUDY – No New Wires! • Communication (and other) Technologies that will impact hotel operations in the future
IN HOUSE AUTOMATION
• Enlightening ideas
DIGITAL SIGNAGE & CUSTOM TV
• "…It's pure marketing, but with an emotional dimension…" – Interview with Betty Castaldi, Idylle Production
CONFERENCE TECHNOLOGIES
• Conference Room Technologies
RESERVATION SYSTEMS – GDS AND PMS
• Interview with Kaweh Niroomand, Micros-Fidelio EAME • HTNG Certification for IDeaS Revenue Optimization • CASE STUDY – Optimising hotel and conference center operations on one database…
SECURITY
• CASE STUDY – Security Evaluation and Verification by HP Strengthens interTouch Service Offering
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
NICK PRICE
President Emeritus – HTNG
CIO/CTO – Mandarin Oriental Group Hotel
Nick Price joined Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group in January 2000 as Director of Technology. A newly created position, the appointment was in line with the Group's objective of strengthening its corporate and specialist core competencies in areas most critical to success. With more than 19 years experience in IT and emerging technologies, Nick brings to Mandarin Oriental, an in-depth understanding of current and emerging technology trends and their commercial application.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
Nick Price is one of the most respected people in the industry when it comes to having a global (in more ways than one) knowledge about Hotel Technologies and how they should be leveraged to truly enhance the guests’ experience.
We asked Nick what was new at the Mandarin Oriental Group, and how he is leveraging technology to create a near to perfect guest experience...
|
|
To some extent we are refining the path we’ve been on for a while, especially since 2003, leveraging networks to be able to either bring in content to a guest that makes sense, or enable our staff to understand something about the guest and to deliver a service that they otherwise couldn’t have done.
Obviously we have been very focused on capturing information about our customers and making that available across our company in terms of an xml profile of the guest, and a fairly rich and deep and accessible xml profile that you can ask questions of the system... “What does somebody like to eat?”... or “What temperature should the room be at?”, or “What kind of wine do they like?”... Things like that... and just to make that information accessible.
Once you have that information you have to think about how to deliver it, and that’s all about networks, and how do you communicate it to the front line staff, and that’s really all about access devices that are hooked onto those networks, and many of those networks are wireless today...
|
|
Of course one would have to avoid saying, “Good morning Mr Smith, you’re not with your usual girlfriend today ... Oh, it’s your wife?”...
You know that’s a cliché ... I’ve heard that so many times. Are we in the business for? We’re in the business to satisfy 99.9% of our guests or are we in the business of XXXXing of 0.1% of them? Just because something can happen doesn’t mean you should build your company or operation around the fact that it will. While I know you meant it as a joke, there are a whole lot of people going around saying, “we’re not going to do this because of that reason. We’re not going to build information in the systems about our customer just in case we are talking about the wife when we should be talking about the girlfriend, and that’s just stupid. It’s just an excuse for not doing things right if you ask me.
|
One of your pet bugbears is that of business models for internet. How are you seeing business models evolving today?
First of all, you have to look at it from both sides, from the hotel side and the suppliers’ side. There is no free lunch. There is no free product today, and from a hotel’s point of view you wouldn’t want to. If you go back five years ago, everyone was rushing for the revenue share “land grab” and the suppliers were very much looking at the long term, saying “we’ll lose money on 2% utilisation, but we’ll make it up on 20% utilisation”, and the hotels were saying “I don’t care, I just want something that satisfies today’s guest. Now those hotels are saying “At 20% look at the amount of money you’re making, Mr Supplier, and I still have three years to go on my revenue share contract!” So both sides have learnt. |
© photo: Mandarin Oriental
|
|
On the supplier side, they’re looking at it and saying “How do I renew my contract with the certainty that I’m not going to be able to roll-over a revenue share contract on the same percentages as I did before?”... Because the unique technology I had back then are now commodities... These can be used today in a much more accessible “Do It Yourself” fashion to the hoteliers. So hoteliers if they wish can assemble these HSIA networks themselves these days at a cost, but that cost is generally affordable based upon the revenues that are a fairly near certainty today and into the near future, so there’s a fairly strong ROI for DIY. Looking out a little bit further, the attractiveness of a DIY model becomes less attractive today if you consider the services you are going to have to bundle onto that network to make it attractive over the long term, because again that’s very much harder to do that it is just to put a simple HSIE service in place today... and also the fact that your costs are definitely going to increase as well, because the bandwidth is increasing, significantly so, and that has to be paid for. So really there are two sides of the thing. Revenue share was a model that is not necessarily the right model for the future, but it may become the right model again as you add more feature functions.
|
© photo: Mandarin Oriental
|
In the past you have spoken of the importance of “bringing the technology islands together”... talking about the different technology groups within the hotel. How do you see this evolving? I guess this is indelibly linked to the HTNG?
It is in a number of ways. Firstly, they are broadly together these days, or they certainly are at Mandarin. We have fully converged networks today in our hotels... fully converged IP networks. So from a functional view you have HSIA, Video On Demand and IP television on the same set of cables – the same network as the administrative network, back of house, PMS and so on, just as CCTV and telephone which is now IP as well, and all of that is wired and wireless. |
|
So the main functional and discreet separate networks that a hotel typically did install on separate unique cable systems is, at least at the Mandarin, a fully converged network today. We’re just months away from opening our first hotels that have no Coax for TV and they have no Coax to drive CCTV. All of those things are on the IP network today.
On Cat 5 or Cat 6?
All Fibre! Fibre to the rooms is going to be a very useful technology. The same model that telcos are using to take fibre to the home... that same basic technology, when you translate it into a fibre to the room, has some basic advantages. It is subtly different from a Cat 6 Ethernet model. It’s more configurable and you can do more with it. You can reserve elements of the bandwidth over the fibre to do interesting things. So it’s definitely a technology that we’re actively investigating.
How is the use of content changing in the field of in-room entertainment?
One of the other things we should absolutely be aware of as hoteliers is that a vast amount of content walks into our rooms every day, brought in by the guests. Whether it’s a USB stick with a film on it or some form of audio or video content, or whether it be an i-Pod or i-Phone or whatever, a huge amount of content is walking into our rooms, and for us to be able to make use of that is a very important thing – providing easily accessible methods whereby a guest who has a small and portable device which is, by definition, very restricted in its picture and sound quality... to plug that into a room and make full use of the room to entertain them or inform them for the period of time they are there... I think it’s a really important thing, because one of the things I think have trained ourselves to believe is that a guest has an awful lot of time in our rooms to be entertained and that is simply not true. The whole notion of a feature film being a relevant piece of content in a hotel room is bogus! I don’t think it ever was correct, but it certainly is bogus today. People don’t have that time, and the viewing figures support that it is irrelevant. So today, really it’s 30 minutes, and it’s what you choose to do in those 30 minutes. Increasingly what we’re seeing is that those 30 minutes are being filled by guests’ own content. It’s that “Let me be me for 30 minutes and make me feel human again. I think it’s a very important thing that we should focus on and try and satisfy. The ability to be able to tune into “u-tube” or the guest’s own DVR via Sling-box or other similar technology I think is also immense. Things that were considered teenage or geeky in the past are now very much mainstream. You have to be a little bit visionary, but you don’t have to be VERY visionary to figure out what people are doing today. You’ve just got to be open to it and understand that those expectations, if they’re met, contribute to your room rate and occupancy, and if they’re not met, contribute negatively to your room rate and occupancy.
|
|
