When the hotel room becomes a connected object

?The hospitality world is beginning its now inevitable digital revolution. It is gradually adapting to the demands and lifestyles of ultra-connected business and leisure guests,? explains Pierre Lafon, President of 1CHECK.

From booking a room to organizing it, including setting up a virtual concierge service, hoteliers must now integrate digital solutions in order to offer distinctive, high-quality personalized services to their guests in near real time.

This priority challenge, essential to ensuring their long-term survival, requires permanent remote management of teams, in particular housekeeping and technical teams, with perfect cohesion between them to ensure optimal operational management of the establishment. Only tailor-made digitalization solutions will allow them to remain attractive and competitive in the near future.

The 1CHECK offer, accessible from a tablet, a smartphone or a web browser, is specifically designed to cover all accommodation management processes in the hotel industry.?

A successful first pilot project with the introduction of connected carts
Positioning itself in a hotel market that had begun its digital transformation, the company had deployed the first connected carts in 2015 in the first Best Western chain hotels.

Each cart, equipped with a touchscreen tablet, enabled housekeepers, in contact with the head housekeeper thanks to a dynamic plan, to report any technical problem in the room in real time and to inform reception as soon as the work was completed.

This service offer had a dual objective: making the room available to the guest again more quickly and improving the responsiveness of the housekeeping teams for greater overall efficiency: time savings, enhanced monitoring and control, rapid interventions, and improved productivity and working conditions.

Now a new connected object, the hotel room interacts simply and effectively with each member of the operational teams
Building on this success, 1CHECK decided to expand its offer for hoteliers by proposing to transform their rooms into connected rooms, to make the teams' work easier and simplify the use of the 1CHECK solution even further. The goal: to allow staff in these establishments to adopt these technologies easily, and to provide an accurate real-time view of the teams' activity.

The start-up has therefore integrated into its process the use of NFC terminals (contactless communication technology), thanks to its partner FAMOCO, one of the leaders in professional mobile terminals, making it possible to link, via these mobile terminals, the room, now equipped with various NFC tags, to the teams (chambermaids, head housekeepers, technicians, etc.).

The information needed for each person's actions, and the tasks to be carried out, are thus accessible simply by passing one's terminal in front of the tag. Information from connected objects is also collected in the same way, in particular from all connected meters measuring water, electricity consumption and more.

The first deployments have shown in particular an even greater gain in ease of use and, as a result, in productivity. As Pierre Lafon points out: ?The digital transformation of a hotel is as much a technology project as an HR project, and while it is important to offer rich features, it is just as important to take care over how the technology is introduced to end users, the field teams, so that adoption of the tools is simple and therefore complete.

It is this thinking that led us to develop this connected room concept and to integrate these new technologies; the first deployments have shown not only gains in operational efficiency but also in user adoption, proof that the approach is right.?