++Contactless check-in and room service robots are the future — and reality — of hotels. That’s not all. +
++With half of all Americans over age 12 fully vaccinated, and Covid-19 cases in the country at a low, many are itching to travel. After a year in their homes, Americans are ready for mints on their pillows and room service. +
++Hold up, though. If you’re planning on staying at a hotel, you’ll quickly learn they’re not the same. From contactless check-in to vending machine meals, chatbot concierges to heightened cleanliness certifications, it’s all part of the new normal for travel. +
++Hotels are more tech-driven than before, with individualized, digital customer service. “We know that the key to recovery and growth is for us to advance technology at a time when such advancements are shaping the industry’s recovery,” said Chip Rogers, president of the American Hotel & Lodging Association. Rogers said that everything from single-pack grab-and-go meals to flexible check-in and check-out times are part of “the new experience.” +
++“This also supports the new traveler trend toward ‘bleisure,’ the combination of business and leisure travel,” he said. +
++Bleisure travel — basically a couple of days of fun tacked onto the end of a business trip — has seen its rise over the past few years with young professionals, especially millennials. +
++Changes may start the moment you enter the hotel. Gone are the days where a hotel receptionist will hand you a set of keys and point you to the elevator. Chains like Marriott, Hyatt, citizenM, and Hilton have all opted for contactless check-in. Most major hotel brands have invested heavily in digital keys, so the guest can skip the front desk and use their phone as a room key. +
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Courtesy of Marriott
++That doesn’t mean you’re not being greeted at the door. Nowadays, hotels have temperature checks at the front (some use thermal imaging cameras that read each guest’s body temperature). +
++For confused travelers wondering why there’s no lobby check-in, “ambassadors” walk around to help hotel guests with contactless check-in on iPads (many boast self-cleaning screens). Or the hotel’s app has information on everything from room service to changing your room temperature. +
++Studio 54’s Ian Schrager, founder of New York City’s luxury Public Hotel, says, “There is no longer a need to make small talk or sit and have a glass of champagne while being checked in or checked out; people don’t want that anymore. They want to get up to their room as fast as possible and not stop by the front desk.” The technology, he explains, needs to add to the experience. +
++A similar philosophy can be found in the Edition Hotel chain. “While technology can help streamline hotel operating functions, a luxury hotel still relies on genuine human interactions to make guests feel good,” said Dan Flannery, senior vice president and managing director at Edition Hotels. +
++“We might not need a check-in desk, but the lobby won’t be empty,” said Torsten van Dullemen, the general manager and area vice president of operations for Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group in Washington, New York, and Boston. Lobbies may become a space for retail, he says, containing juice bars, florists, shops, and hair salons. +
++Upstairs, post-pandemic hotel rooms will have less bling and fanfare, opting for a more minimal and sanitary experience. For some hotels, expect that to be reflected in room design, including antimicrobial surfaces, even special resins used on the floors and walls (which prevent viruses from sticking), as well as auto-cleaning metals in bathrooms, according to hotel designer Jean-Michel Gathy. +
++Thompson properties offer smart-designed guest rooms (and contactless entry), where guests can adjust in-room preferences with a quick phone tap. Hotels are also offering smart mirrors in hotel bathrooms (watch the morning news as you brush your teeth) and voice-activated, contactless room control systems such as Volara (like Amazon Alexa). +
++Contactless room control is the future, according to the hotel wifi provider DeepBlue, which says guests will expect rooms to automatically adjust to preferred room and water temperatures (and TV channels) before they even arrive. +
++Dining will change, too. Many reports detail how the pandemic sounded the death knell for the breakfast buffet as it brought the end of shared serving utensils. But others beg to differ. “I think people still want choice,” said van Dullemen. “Dining has become more creative.” +
++At Mandarin Oriental in Washington, the hotel partnered with the owner of the Michelin star restaurant Rose’s Luxury to create in-room dining, where beds are shoved out of the way to make room for dining tables that fit up to six people. Don’t call it room service; it’s more like an upscale dinner in a hotel room. +
++“We’ve been booked out every night,” van Dullemen said. Some of the culinary experiences include “Dinner & Movie,” where streaming is paired with snacks and an upscale meal, as well as an in-room “Afternoon Tea,” which is typically held in the hotel’s Empress Lounge, but is now available in-room with a menu offering foie gras, scones, macarons, and champagne. +
++Breakfast has been replaced by vending machines as part of the grab-and-go meals at two Fairfield by Marriott hotels. The Marriott Bonvoy app allows guests to preorder meals, which they can get at the kiosks, including breakfast items like yogurt, fruit, muffins, and hot sandwiches. +
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Courtesy of Marriott
++Beyond vending machines, though, most dining at hotels today can be preordered through an app (or scanned via QR code) and delivered to your table or directly to your room. HospitalityNet writes that the QR code “became the silent hero of pandemic operations,” ushering in the contactless menu. +
++“I hope QR codes stay, but not as a means of saving wages or costs; it offers opportunities to really focus on critical ways to make an impact on our guests,” said van Dullemen. +
++With the rise of smart tech at hotels, messenger chat and door delivery aim to be seamless; instead of hearing a knock at the door, you get a ping on your phone. +
++Open the door at the Sonesta San Jose to see a three-foot-tall robot wearing a bow-tie sticker. Under its lid: a preordered meal or slippers, delivered within 10 minutes of ordering. Steve Cousins, founder and CEO of Savioke, which makes the “Relay” bots, says they’re not meant to replace staff but rather to help make late-night deliveries or during rush hours. +
++“The robots are doing three times as many deliveries as they did before the pandemic,” said Cousins. “Guests who have experienced robot delivery usually ask for it the next time they need something. It is fast, it doesn’t seem to inconvenience the staff, and they do not have to tip it.” +
++But are apps just secretly cost-cutting measures for hotels? Will human staff be replaced by apps, AI, and robots? +
++Despite the technological innovation over the past year, Rogers says the opposite is true: There’s so much demand for hotel staff, there’s a staffing shortage. +
++“The opportunity to enter and move up in our industry has never been better,” said Rogers. “As hotels welcome the return of summer leisure travelers, we are facing a rapidly emerging issue of staffing shortages, so hotels around the country are engaged in robust recruiting efforts.” +
++But that won’t offset the 500,000 hospitality jobs that were lost in the pandemic. Rogers and the AHLA are calling on members of Congress to pass the Save Hotel Jobs Act, which would provide payroll grants and tax credits to aid hotel workers. +
++Cousins thinks hotels will use the robots long after the pandemic, but that’s not to say they’ll replace employees. “The bots are a tool hotel staff use to provide a higher level of service,” he said. “Relay robots allow a front desk agent to quickly respond to a phone request from a guest, while remaining at their post to greet the next guest that arrives.” +
++Another kind of bot on the rise at hotels is chatbot services, like the new Four Seasons Chat, which launched last fall, allowing Four Seasons guests to instant message hotel staff before, during, and after their stay. According to the hotel’s stats, customers use it, on average, six times during a stay. +
++The Public Hotel in New York uses a similar technology, and there, contactless doesn’t lack human contact — as long as vacationers want it that way. The hotel’s app allows guests to control how much they interact with staff, who will still be on hand to help guests in the restaurant, on the elevator ride to the rooftop nightclub, or via live chat. +
++Remember when hotels offered locals maps of the area? The concierge’s hand-drawn recommendations of a nearby neighborhood have been replaced by digital versions. InterContinental Hotels Group’s Hotel Indigo uses a chatbot that allows guests to ask about local hot spots and get recommendations for restaurants, bars, and street art walks around the city. +
++Amenities are changing, too. Many hotels are offering to deliver fitness equipment to hotel rooms, from yoga mats to weights, which are likely to replace the communal hotel gym. There are fitness classes on smart TVs in some hotel rooms, and live video training. +
++All of these strategies were conjured up when hotels went dark during the toughest days of lockdown. Most hotels got creative with their plans to reopen. Apps now offer guests real-time updates on things like pool hours, elevator capacity, and controlling TV, lights, temperature, and meal orders. +
++Hotels are now used not only for guests but for local businesses, too. Over the past few months, there has been a rise in office “aparthotels,” where business travelers can practically live in hotel rooms, or long-term residences with designated office space in each room, part of the “working from hotel” movement. +
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Mandarin Oriental
++Mandarin Oriental’s Washington, DC, location offers MOBase, a new membership program for business people who need office space. For $4,500 a month, guests have a dedicated guest room with an ergonomic chair, office supplies including a printer, and access to the hotel’s business center for meetings or Zoom calls. The pricey membership also offers unlimited use of the hotel’s spa, pool, fitness center, storage, and dining. +
++“With remote working continuing for the foreseeable future, our goal is to offer guests, as well as locals, a space to live and work in a well-designed, safe, convenient, and productive atmosphere,” said van Dullemen. +
++These aparthotel rooms are going strong, with the hotel planning to devote an entire floor to them. They’re mostly being used by people who live just outside of the city but come regularly for work and don’t want to schlep their stuff around every week. +
++“The pandemic forced us to reassess our business model. Can we do other things?” said van Dullemen. “I don’t think it has created a new market; it was always there, but nobody thought about asking for it. We’ve had to deeply engage with our guests and try new things.” +
++“Only we can bring back hotels and do it together,” he added. “Not only as hotels, but as travelers, businesspeople, employees, and guests all together. More than ever before, our industry will require a personal touch. We’ll bounce back quicker than people might expect.” +
++The company is notifying people when they search for rapidly evolving topics. +
++Google is testing a new feature to notify people when they search for a topic that may have unreliable results. The move is a notable step by the world’s most popular search engine to give people more context about breaking information that’s popular online — like suspected UFO sightings or developing news stories — that are actively evolving. +
++The new prompt warns users that the results they are seeing are changing quickly, and reads, in part, “If this topic is new, it can sometimes take time for results to be added by reliable sources.” Google confirmed to Recode that it started testing the feature about a week ago. Currently, the company says the notice is only showing up in a small percentage of searches, which tend to be about developing trending topics. +
++Companies like Google, Twitter, and Facebook have often struggled to handle the high volume of misinformation, conspiracy theories, and unverified news stories that run rampant on the internet. In the past, they have largely stayed away from taking content down in all but the most extreme cases, citing a commitment to free speech values. During the Covid-19 pandemic and the 2020 US elections, some companies took the unprecedented action of taking down popular accounts perpetuating misinformation. But the kind of label Google is rolling out — which simply warns users without blocking content — reflects a more long-term incremental approach to educating users about questionable or incomplete information. +
++“When anybody does a search on Google, we’re trying to show you the most relevant, reliable information we can,” said Danny Sullivan, a public liaison for Google Search. “But we get a lot of things that are entirely new,” +
++
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Google
++Sullivan said the notice isn’t saying that what you’re seeing in search results is right or wrong — but that it’s a changing situation, and more information may come out later. +
++As an example, Sullivan cited a report about a suspected UFO sighting in the UK. +
++“Someone had gotten this police report video released out in Wales, and it’s had a little bit bit of press coverage. But there’s still not a lot about it,” said Sullivan. “But people are probably searching for it, they may be going around on social media — so we can tell it’s starting to trend. And we can also tell that there’s not a lot of necessarily great stuff that’s out there. And we also think that maybe new stuff will come along,” +
++Other examples of trending search queries that could currently prompt the notice are “why is britney on lithium” and “black triangle ufo ocean” +
++The feature builds on Google’s recent efforts to help users with “search literacy,” or to better understand context about what they’re looking up. In April 2020, the company released a feature telling people when there aren’t enough good matches for their search, and in February 2021, it added an “about” button next to most search results showing people a brief Wikipedia description of the site they’re seeing, when available. +
++Google told Recode it ran user research on the notice that showed people found it helpful. +
++The new prompt is also part of a larger trend by major tech companies to give people more context about new information that could turn out to be be wrong. Twitter, for example, released a slew of features ahead of the 2020 US elections cautioning users if information they were seeing was not yet verified. +
++Some social media researchers welcome the types of added context like the one Google rolled out today, including Renee DiResta at the Stanford Internet Observatory who tweeted about the feature. It’s a welcome alternative, they say, to the debates around whether or not to ban a certain account or post. +
++“It’s a great way of making people pause before they act on or spread information further,” said Evelyn Douek, a researcher at Harvard who studies online speech. “It doesn’t involve anyone making judgments about the truth or falsity of any story but just gives the readers more context. … In almost all breaking news contexts, the first stories are not the complete ones, and so it’s good to remind people of that.” +
++There are still some questions about how this all will work, though. For example, it’s not clear exactly what sources Google finds to be reliable on a given search result, and how many reliable sources need to weigh in before a questionable trending news topic loses the label. As the feature rolls out more broadly, we can likely expect to see more discussion about how it’s implemented. +
++BuzzFeed is smaller than it thought it was going to be but it thinks it’s big enough to sell shares to the public this fall. +
++Digital media used to be exciting — a story about flashy new upstarts and paradigms displacing the old guard. Then reality hit. The old guys stuck around, a lot of the newcomers got a lot quieter, and in some cases, they basically imploded. +
++Now digital media is kind of boring. And that’s good. +
++That, in a couple sentences, is the story of BuzzFeed, which is now set to go public — 15 years after founder Jonah Peretti started it as a side project to his day job at the Huffington Post, and about five years after the last digital media hype cycle peaked. +
++Back in 2016, at its buzziest, BuzzFeed convinced investors it was worth at least $1.7 billion dollars. Now it thinks it is worth $1.2 billion, and will be worth $1.5 billion after it buys Complex, the digital media publisher/video company/events business, for $300 million as part of its move to go public. The company also plans to add $150 million in debt to its books to make the deal happen. +
++“There was a period of exuberance and hype around digital media, and that hype cycle allowed a lot of capital to flow into the space,” Peretti said in an interview. “And then there was a period where there was a lot more skepticism, and a demand to build a real business. And now we’ve built a real business.” +
++The business Peretti built is still modest compared to older media companies, and tiny compared to the Google-Facebook duopoly that controls digital advertising: Combined, BuzzFeed and Complex generated $421 million in revenue last year, which is a drop from the $425 million it made the year before. BuzzFeed says the two companies made $17 million in profit last year — if you agree to measure profit differently than a traditional accountant would. +
++But BuzzFeed is betting that the combined companies will still be able to grow at a 25 percent clip for the next few years, and hit more than $1 billion in revenue by the end of 2024. That company will still be competing with Facebook and Google for digital ads, but Peretti and his bankers project that a third of the company’s revenue will come from selling stuff to consumers — either directly, via deals like BuzzFeed-branded cooking gear at Walmart — or by getting paid to send BuzzFeed readers to retailers like Amazon. +
++BuzzFeed looks like it will be the first big digital publisher to go public via a SPAC, where it is essentially merging with a “blank check” shell company that’s built specifically for the purpose of taking a private company public. +
++The mechanics of a SPAC aren’t terribly important for the average BuzzFeed reader, advertiser, or employee, though BuzzFeed competitors I’ve talked to are raising an eyebrow at the fact that BuzzFeed is taking on debt in the transaction instead of selling a chunk of equity to an investor. (More inside baseball: Competitors snipe that Verizon and Hearst, the companies that own Complex, are taking most of the sale price in cash instead of equity in the new company; on the other hand, Hearst already owns a piece of BuzzFeed, via an investment it made early in the company’s history, and Verizon got a piece of BuzzFeed last year when it handed HuffPost back to Peretti, who had co-founded the company.) +
++What will be more important to the Vices and Vox Medias of the world is what public investors think of BuzzFeed when its shares start trading, since they are all looking at a similar path. +
++That’s because they have to: A few years ago, it seemed like the digital upstarts were built to be sold to big media companies. At various points, Disney was interested in buying BuzzFeed and Vice, and Comcast invested hundreds of millions in both BuzzFeed and Vox. But Disney and Comcast are now focused on competing with Netflix and don’t have any interest in digital publishing companies struggling to compete with Facebook. So now digital media companies need to figure out how to become grown-up, public companies themselves. +
++Peretti has already learned one trick from the successful media and tech companies he’s competing with: How to go public without losing control of your company. Peretti says BuzzFeed will be a “dual-class” company, which means it will have two sets of shares — one for the general public to buy, and one for insiders, like Peretti, which come with extra voting power. Peretti says that when the deal closes near the end of this year, he’ll retain the majority of voting shares in BuzzFeed, giving him final say over the company’s direction. Very grown-up. +