From May 20 – September 2, 2013, The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf® will keep their customers cool during their landmark 50^th anniversary celebration with the introduction of a new Birthday Cake Ice Blended® beverage.

Available nationwide, the drink will be offered alongside the brand’s limited time summer Rocky Road and signature Mocha flavors. The Original Ice Blended® drink from The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf® pioneered the frozen coffee craze. The innovative handcrafted beverage was created in 1989 when a team member at the Westwood, CA store brought a blender from home, borrowed ice from the store next door, and blended together coffee, chocolate powder, milk, and ice.

Today, over 20,000 Ice Blended® drinks are served daily worldwide and over 7 million annually.

Marking the new Ice Blended® flavors’ debut on Monday, May 20, The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf® hosts its 50^th Birthday Celebration with Buy One Get One Free Birthday Cake, Mocha, and Rocky Road Ice Blended® beverage daily June 3 – 7 from 2pm-6pm at participating stores across California and Arizona.

In addition, the brand will designate Thursday, June 27, 2013 as ‘The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf® Day’ in Los Angeles, CA.

 “We were ahead of the curve when we first introduced the Ice Blended® beverage, sparking the future of iced coffee drinks” notes President Mel Elias. “In honor of our 50^th anniversary and continuing to keep our customers cool and refreshed, we want to tap into our favorite childhood flavors to create new memories with our guests, those young as well as those young-at-heart.”

Treating loyal The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf® fans throughout summer 2013, the company’s new Ice Blended® mobile truck will tour Southern California cities including Los Angeles, Orange County, and San Diego sharing free Birthday Cake, Rocky Road and Mocha Ice Blended® samples.

The truck will also participate in various outdoor events including KIIS FM Wango Tango, the Billabong XXL Big Wave Awards, the Vans U.S. Open of Surfing, and the X Games. Fans can track the truck by following @TheCoffeeBean on Twitter and using the hashtag #IceBlendedTruck.

Tying a food truck, and thereby adding mobility, to an already-established brand is an ambitious idea, one that seems fruitful considering the summer tour lineup. Utilizing a hashtag will allow fans to track its whereabouts and streamlined any shared images of the experience.

Will you visit the Ice Blended Truck this summer?

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In the bustling global economy, there are many different paths to the top. If your goal is to make more money annually than some entire countries, an MBA is certainly not the only way to do it. In fact, a hospitality management degree may be just the thing. The hotel and lodging industry is lucrative enough to have created some of the heaviest financial hitters the world has ever seen.

Here are five of the richest hotel owners:

1. Sheldon Adelson

With a net worth of $21.8 billion, Sheldon Adelson is the 12th wealthiest American and the 24th richest man on Earth. Adelson’s wealth originally came from his development of COMDEX, a computer exposition held from 1979 to 2003. COMDEX was the premier computer trade show in the ’80s and ’90s and one of the largest trade shows in the world. Adelson used his earnings to buy Las Vegas’ Sands Hotel and Casino in 1988. He and his partners purchased the former Rat Pack haunt to stimulate the exhibition industry in the city, and they built the Sands Expo and Convention Center in 1989. An expansion project for the center was announced in 2008, and it includes a second expo building with two million square feet of space.

Adelson’s honeymoon to Venice in 1991 inspired him to raze the Sands Hotel and replace it with the Venetian, a mega-resort with more than 4,000 suites, 18 restaurants, and canals complete with gondolas. The Sands Corporation now operates Vegas-style resorts and casinos in Asian countries like China and Singapore and is currently planning a EuroVegas project in Spain.

2. Donald Trump

Donald Trump got his start in the real estate industry by working for his father at Elizabeth Trump and Son, a middle-class rental company in New York City. While still in his 20s, Trump used a $500,000 investment to add over a million dollars in value to a foreclosed apartment complex in Cincinnati, Ohio. He quickly moved on to larger building projects and was applauded for his use of attractively designed architecture. The Trumpster later set his sights on the hotel industry, and he reopened New York’s Commodore Hotel as the Grand Hyatt New York in 1980. He continued to build hotels in America and internationally, and some of his most successful projects bear his name. Trump World Tower, a 72-story residential skyscraper located across from the United Nations Headquarters, was completed in 2001. Trump is currently worth more than $3 billion and is developing multiple hotel projects worldwide.

3. William Barron Hilton

He may be cursed with an embarrassing granddaughter, but William Barron Hilton also has $2.5 billion to his name. Hilton was born in Dallas, Texas, to Conrad Nicholson Hilton, the owner of the international hotel chain Hilton Hotels. He began his career as a humble elevator operator at the El Paso Hilton and became the president of the company less than 15 years later. Not content to rest on the work of his forebears, Hilton made his family’s company the third largest lodging business in the world by the late 1990s. Much of this success was due to Barron Hilton’s addition of gambling to the chain with the Las Vegas Hilton. He also helped organize a $26 billion merger with a financial services company called the Blackstone Group in 2007. Hilton Hotels & Resorts is currently worth a staggering $8.7 billion.

4. Phillip Ruffin

A Kansas native and college dropout, Phillip Ruffin started his career in the convenience store industry. His pioneering implementation of self-serve gasoline in the state allowed him to open a chain of 60 stores. In 1987, Ruffin used the earnings from these convenience stores to purchase a Marriott hotel in Wichita. In the mid-1990s, he leased his convenience stores and bought more hotels as well as the Crystal Palace casino resort in the Bahamas. Ruffin’s hotel division now operates 13 hotels, and his net worth has grown to $2.5 billion. Being one of the wealthiest hotel moguls in the world certainly has its perks, and Ruffin married a 26-year-old Miss Ukraine winner in 2008.

5. Ty Warner

Ty Warner may be best known for generating the countless Beanie Babies currently piled up in basements and attics across the world, but much of his current wealth comes from the real estate industry. When the Beanie Baby craze reached full force in the 1990s, Ty Inc. was making $700 million a year in profits. Warner used his substantial earnings to invest in hotels, purchasing the Four Seasons Hotel in New York for $275 million. The hotel’s Ty Warner Penthouse Suite costs an incredible $41,836 each night, making it one of the most expensive hotel rooms in the world. He now owns hotels and resorts in California, Hawaii, Mexico, and Florida. His wealth is estimated at a cool $2.4 million.

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This post was contributed by Scott Kaufman. Scott works in education where we writes frequently about hospitality. His work has been featured on Concordia University Online and several other major universities.

The post Top 5 Richest Hotel Moguls and How They Got There appeared first on Social Hospitality.

Two inventive students at the University of Kentucky have been working on advancing the personal hotel concierge. Crambu is a text-message based concierge service that allows guests to customize their vacations from the simple touch of their own smartphones.

While many luxury properties already offer such services, Crambu is geared toward smaller hotels that may not already be implementing such services technologically.

It is currently being beta tested in 4 hotels in KY and IN: Embassy Suites Lexington (full service), Crowne Plaza Louisville (full service airport), Fairfield Inn- Princeton IN (limited service), and Gratz Park Inn Lexington (boutique). They are very different hotels with room quantities ranging from 40-588.

Here’s how it works:
A guest enters their phone number on an iPad located at a check-in desk. A staff member then verifies the guests length of stay and room number on an iPad located behind the check-in desk.

The front desk of the Crowne Plaza Hotel features iPads, allowing guests to personalize their stay.

The guest then receives a text message with a custom link, which opens a web app personalized towards that guest. From the web app, a guest can make room requests for towels, noise complaints, roll-away beds, maintenance requests, etc.

They can also view general hotel and local information such as pool and spa hours, WiFi username and passwords, TV guides, frequently asked questions, local food and entertainment recommendations, restaurant directions and menus, local tour guides, etc.

Guests without smartphones can make room requests by text message, so this system works for any phone on the market.

Staff members respond to room requests and communicate with guests from the iPad located behind the check-in desk.

Crambu is actively seeking feedback to help better their product. Would you use a text messaging service to communicate with your hotel? What could make this service better? Please leave your thoughts in the comments below!

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Klout and American Airlines (AA) have announced a partnership that allows social media influencers access to AA’s exclusive Admiral’s Club.

A Klout score over 55 will allow you to gain access to 37 of the airline’s lounges in 22 different cities, and you don’t have to fly American to be eligible, as would normally be the case. Guests reap a variety of benefits, ranging from complimentary wine to shower suites at select locations.

If you fall a little short of 55, don’t worry! You are entered into a drawing for the potential to win prizes including all expenses-paid trips to Seattle, along with products from other brands that have partnered with Klout such as Sony, Chevrolet, and Microsoft.

Klout utilizes social media analytics to measure your online social influence. Upon analyzing 400 variables throughout your multiple social networks, it determines a score between one and 100, with 100 representing the most influential.

It’s become more apparent that the hospitality industry has a lot to gain from social media influencers. Getting the right people into their exclusive lounges means more traffic to their websites via Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, along with increased brand exposure.

Other airlines in need of significant image boosts would greatly benefit from partnering with Klout to gain insight on what kinds of amenities an individual takes into consideration before booking their next flight. Other mobile apps that ease flyers and create a more positive association with their airliner have already seen some headway.

With the decline of amenities in most airlines due to economic restraints, companies must resort to other avenues of representation or else suffer complacency. What better way to strengthen bonds between brands and their influencers than to put them in the cockpit of their initiatives?

What kinds of airline perks would you like to see offered next?

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Instagram has established itself as a piece of a vast digital mosaic that businesses and companies have used to gain insight on how trends emerge. Since acquiring the infamous photo-sharing app in early 2012, Facebook has adapted one of their key tagging tools to Instagram called “Photos of You.”

Until now, the only way you could tag a friend or your favorite restaurant was to add their handle in the comments section. Now, you’re able to tag friends and venues by hovering over the photo itself, much like Facebook.

These photos will then be indexed in its very own profile section on the tagged individual’s profile, allowing anyone to be able to see photos they have been tagged in by simply searching their name. As a result, a convenient listening tool for brands has emerged, creating the ability for businesses to track how they are seen by an online community.

To businesses in the hospitality industry, this means additional real estate for loyal fans to represent the company’s image.

Restaurants will be able to collect real-time data from the photos that are tagged at their venue. They’ll see what dishes are more popular than others, as well as what their customers find favorable in the ambiance or interior decor. What guests find thoughtful or unobtrusive in a hotel suite will now be more accessible to owners to implement solutions.

Instagram will also feature an easy way to untag photos of yourself to mitigate any apprehension from users, leaving only the best photos intact. This adds a level of storytelling that will create meaningful associations between brands and their influencers.

Photos of You streamlines the ability to see photos tagged by anyone in the format of a collage instead of notifications. Additionally, photos taken of you by a friend will not only be seen on their Instagram feed, but now in yours as well. This eliminates the gaps in your activity that otherwise wouldn’t be seen by your followers.

There is great potential for user-generated traffic that will reveal what kinds of photos are tagged. These in turn can be used to pioneer better campaigns that focus on specific demographics and themes. Combined with other Instagram marketing strategies or a social media marketing platform for Instagram, brands can use analytics to leverage Instagram as a business tool.

Will this tagging feature impact the way you use Instagram? Tell us how!

The post Instagram Launches Photo Indexing, Photos of You appeared first on Social Hospitality.

Starting and maintaining a restaurant business is no easy task. There are many factors that come into play. The success rate of restaurants is much lower when compared to other industries. The risk involved turns many people off from opening one of their own. The amount of capital to open a physical location requires investors and involves a lot of red tape. If done right though, a restaurant business can become quite a profitable venture. It’s important to know what you’re getting into.

1) Get a Website

The Yellow Pages are dead. People no longer thumb through a thousand page book to find local businesses. Creating an internet presence is paramount to your restaurants success. Some best practices when creating a website for your restaurant:

2) Include Your Menu

Your customers first and foremost want to know what food you serve. Include a text based menu that lists everything you serve. Don’t just throw up a .pdf file of your menu. Search engines can’t read that and it often looks bad on mobile devices.

• Hire a search marketing firm. Having a strong presence on Google is like having a free billboard on the world’s busiest highway. The value of being found for free on the internet cannot be overstated.
• Have a responsive website – because most everyone has a smartphone these days it’s wise to have a website that scales on mobile devices, allowing visitors to peruse your restaurant and jump from page to page without having to “pinch and zoom”.
• State the essentials – include a page that lists the restaurant location and hours. In fact, it would be smart to list them in the header of the website or even on the homepage. Include holiday hours as well.

There are also several advertising channels that are effective for restaurants. Google AdWords has a simple to use interface. And local services like Yelp provide great mobile packages that cater to consumers on the go.

3) Establish A Relationship With an Online Vendor

There are several websites that provide online equipment and supplies ordering like Instawares - an online restaurant equipment and supplies company that carries everything you need to get started with opening your own restaurant. Having a relationship with your vendor allows you to easily order supplies and equipment when you run out. Often times, these companies will setup a workflow where they’ll recognize when you’re out of stock and detect seasonal patterns in your ordering I.E. – if you’re in a summer tourist-town and are only open during those months a reliable restaurant equipment company will call you in the beginning of summer and check if you’re freezers and refrigerators are working properly. There are several items that require more frequent replacement than others, chief amongst them being dinnerware. Finding a reliable source to buy flatware and dinnerware online eases your nerves as glassware and table items are dropped and broken.

4) Listen (and talk back) to Your Customers

This can be said of any industry but with restaurants it’s extremely important to listen to what the market wants. Restaurants tend to be “word of mouth” businesses that carry on the goodwill of its current customers. Thanks to new channels like social networks, online review sites, and restaurant blogs, it’s easier (and cheaper) than ever to listen to what people are saying about your restaurant. These channels include:

• Facebook – having a Facebook page for your restaurant is a no-brainer. It’s easy to setup and can be accessed and “liked” by anyone who uses the service. Tie it to your website as well and share updates via your newsfeed. A solid strategy is to blog frequently and mention those posts on your Facebook page. Your effectively killing two birds with one stone by publishing on the web and within Facebook.

• Twitter – while many see this as the mouthpiece for teenage girls and celebrities it’s actually a very effective way for you to communicate with your customers. Hashtags and “mentions” are the backbone of Twitter and your restaurant can greatly benefit from proper use of them. If someone lodges a complaint then it’s your duty to address this. Twitter allows you to respond to angry customers in public which shows that you care about what people think about your restaurant.
• Pinterest – this is a must for foodies. Restaurants seem to be a natural fit for this image-based social network. And because of its open API many times when people take pictures of their food at restaurants it’s cross published to their other networks like Facebook and Twitter.

Take these criticisms that appear on social networks and work them into your overall marketing/business strategy. While many see social networks as a vehicle for “promotion” they are most effectively used for communication.

5) Keep Track of Your Customers

This can be done through a number of methods. Back in the day (and probably still) restaurants would do giveaways where customers would drop their business cards in a jar out front for a chance to win a free meal. The restaurants would then collect the email information on the cards and add them to a mailing list, offering catering and corporate party information. While this tactic may still work it’s important to identify more effective ways to collect their information. Building a customer database is important and what you do with that information is even more vital. Email marketing is easier and more effective than ever. You should be segmenting lists and creating different personas based on open rates in response to specific promotions.

Set Yourself Apart

Although it’s tempting to offer everything you can possibly cook it’s wise to specialize in one area. If people want variety they will go to a generic restaurant like Applebees or Outback steakhouse where they can get everything from spicy oriental chicken to a porterhouse steak. Be good at one thing and stick to it. Think about the most famous restaurants where you live: their often packed to the gills on weekend nights. Going out to eat is an experience and you need to sell your restaurant as such. You don’t see lines stretching around the block for Olive Garden. What you do see lines for is “Joe’s Steamhouse Lounge” – a restaurant that may specialize in seafood.

6) Service, Service, Service

Speaking of customer complaints. Most unpleasant experiences related to restaurants stem not from undercooked food or cheap wine, but customer service. There are several ways to ensure a quality customer experience:

• Hire a good wait staff – do background checks, ask for references and have potential hires sit down with another member of your staff (more perspectives the better). Thoroughly vetting your staff ensures that you won’t be hiring an rotten eggs.
• You get what (who) you pay for – this old adage applies to restaurants as well. What do you expect if you’re paying your staff $4/hour?
• Know your demographic – if you’re opening a sports=themed restaurant it may be wise to hire more women as waiters, considering that most of your clientele will be men. Likewise if you’re opening a quirky organic breakfast place you may want to aim for a more eclectic waitstaff.

7) Do Competitive Research

Go out and see what your competitors are doing. Eat at other restaurants and take notes. Notice what others are doing right and try to emulate that in your restaurant. Also take notice of things they’re doing wrong and try not to repeat it. Restaurant owners are some of the most creative, business minded people in the world. Creating an experience that’s original and different will have people appreciate your restaurant and keep coming back for more. There’s also something to be learned from restaurant chains as well. There’s several reasons why they’ve grown to such national (and in some cases international) prominence. I.E.- Cracker Barrel. They have a schtick right? When you walk in there’s an old-timey gift shop filled with knick knacks and rocking chairs. They serve “home-cooked” meals. They’re marketing and knick knack store are meant to give people a familiar comfort.

Target The Right Demographic

Understanding where the wallets are is important if you want to last in the restaurant business. If you’re catering towards a lower-income demographic then you want your marketing to reflect that. In most cases though, you want to target consumers with the most money to spend. This way you can spend more on making your restaurant great and offering the best foods and service. If you’re going after an older crowd you must realize that that’s a well which will eventually run dry. Young up-and-comers is the holy grail of demographics because this crowd will form eating habits that they’ll carry over to their social circles and family. That’s why understanding modern marketing principles is necessary to capture this demographic. Young, affluent consumers are extremely savvy thanks to modern technologies like smartphones, iPads, and other connected devices.

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This post was contributed by Clayton Curtis. Clayton works for Instawares, a restaurant equipment and cooking supplies company.

The post 7 Important Tips for Restaurant Owners appeared first on Social Hospitality.

Effective Link Building Strategies for the Hospitality Industry

The hospitality industry is one of the most competitive industries there is. With so much competition it can be hard to stand out or differentiate yourself from the rest of the crowd. Nowhere else is this more true than on the web. However, there are certain techniques and strategies that you can employ to help yourself (and your website) become more visible. One way to do this is to ensure that you rank high for important keywords to your niche in Google searches. The most effective way to achieve this goal is by executing effective link building strategies and practices.

Choosing the Right Keywords

The first thing to consider when beginning a link building strategy for your hospitality business is which keywords are important for your niche and which keywords should you be targeting. Choosing the right keywords is important because the ultimate goal of link building is to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs) for these specific keywords. There a few different factors that should go into this decision.

First you should brainstorm and figure out which keywords you think are important to your niche. For example, for a hotel in Florida it may be “Florida hotel rooms” or for an Italian restaurant it may be “best Italian restaurant”. Notice that the keywords are specific to each company rather than general keywords such as “hotel rooms” or “restaurant” because these keywords usually are easier to rank for and will drive more quality traffic to your site.

Another thing to consider is what your competitors are ranking for. Take some time to research this by typing different keywords into Google and seeing where your competitors are ranking for each one. This will help you decide which keywords you need to rank higher for and be more competitive with.

After brainstorming and researching your competitor’s keywords you should have a pretty good idea of what keywords you want to rank for. If you still need more ideas or want to see how competitive the keywords you have chosen are; you can use this helpful and free Google tool.

Target Sites in your Niche

Another important aspect of successful link building is choosing the right sites to guest post on and link to. This is also important as it will determine how helpful, or potentially harmful, your links will be in improving your rank on the SERPs.

It is important that you target websites that are relevant to your niche and the keywords you are trying to rank for. To use the example of the Italian restaurant again, you would be ideally targeting sites that focus primarily on Italian food, provide Italian recipes, etc. The more relevant the site is to your niche and keywords, the more powerful the link you establish will be.

While finding relevant niche sites can be very beneficial to your link building cause, it is important to be aware that there are also sites that may not be so helpful. There are some sites that if linked to, can actually be detrimental to your link building project.

This is because these sites are “spammy” and may be associated with some less than reputable sites, which Google does not like. In regards to link building, if Google doesn’t like it then you also don’t like it, and therefore should avoid these sites. An easy way to detect one of these sites is by skimming through a few of the articles posted on the site and examining the writing. If it is incoherent or doesn’t seem to make sense then you want to avoid the website.

Choosing the right keywords and the right sites to place links with those keywords on are two of the most important factors to a successful link building strategy. If you keep the information mentioned here in mind, you should be able to effectively build links that will improve your ranking in the Google SERPs. Link building is a useful strategy for any type of business, but it can be especially effective in the hospitality industry where the competition is so fierce.

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This post was conributed by Andrew Dennis. Andrew is writer for the relevancy first link building company Page One Power. For more helpful articles regarding link building; check out the Page One Power Blog.

The post Effective Link Building Strategies for the Hospitality Industry appeared first on Social Hospitality.

Counting the sea as a source of inspiration since its founding 30 years ago, Rubio’s is dedicated to doing its part to “Be a Friend to the Ocean.” In honor of World Oceans Day (June 8), Rubio’s will host a beach cleanup and party in Oceanside, CA, for the San Diego community to come together and celebrate the ocean.

With more than 1,000 community members expected to join in the May 11 festivities at the Junior Seau Oceanside Pier Amphitheatre, the celebration will kick off at 10am and include free lunch for all attendees, cooking demonstrations, complimentary surf lessons and face paintings, an extreme bocce ball tournament, beach games and art exhibitions comprised of trash from local-area artists. San Diego’s 94.9 FM will be on hand, as will two Southern California bands, The Little Ones and Jet West, to perform live.

This event will also celebrate the launch of Rubio’s “Be a Friend to the Ocean” campaign for 2013. This initiative will find the iconic San Diego brand hosting beach cleanups, online contests, events and more, all aimed at engaging and inspiring community members to be a friend of the ocean year-round. Rubio’s other ocean-friendly plans include: in-store donations, children’s ambassador program, ocean-centric online games, trash art installations and a reusable tote bag giveaway on June 8.

Fans, supporters, friends and community members are invited to come out for a day of beach-side fun and festivities. The party will include free lunch for all attendees, cooking demonstrations, complimentary surf lessons and face painting, an extreme bocce ball tournament, an interactive game booth from GameStop®, beach games and art exhibitions comprised of trash from local-area artists.

Rubio’s is also giving Social Hospitality readers the chance to try its craveable menu options fresh from the grill this Cinco De Mayo. Since the first store opened, Rubio’s has sold more than 170 million Original Fish Tacos®. Today, Rubio’s menu, which serves 85 percent sustainable seafood, has grown from The Original Fish Taco to include additional recipes inspired by the sea that feature sustainable shrimp, Atlantic salmon, Regal Springs® tilapia and mahi mahi. Rubio’s will be adding three new seafood items, hitting stores May 8.

What’s your favorite taco? Let us know in the comments below to be entered to win one of four $10 Rubio’s gift cards!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

The post Celebrate World Ocean Day and Cinco de Mayo appeared first on Social Hospitality.

Photo credit: Sarah Lawless via Getty Images

You’ve no doubt heard the old, oft-quoted adage, “men are from Mars, women are from Venus,” used to denote the fact that men and women may not always see completely eye to eye.

While this light-hearted statement isn’t taken literally, when it comes to the virtual world of Internet interactions, similar sentiments may be formed surrounding the different ways men and women use social networking.

While the majority of adults in the US are plugged into some sort of social media outlet, not all of them are used in equal measure, and not all of them are used by both genders equally.

For instance, the average Google+ user spend just three minutes per month on the network, while the average Facebook user will spend 405 minutes per month updating statuses, posting pictures, and checking out others’ profiles.

So what can be learned about men and women in the world of the web? As is turns out, men and women tend to dominate very different social media networks.

The following infographic courtesy of Internet Service Providers takes a look at some of the differences between male and female-dominated social media sites: How many users each one has, as well as how they interact.

The post Infographic: Battle of the (Social) Sexes appeared first on Social Hospitality.

Smartphones are becoming ubiquitous across the world. They have made life so much easier and more convenient in many ways, and they are particularly useful for travelers. Smartphones become a companion on the road, providing us with up-to-date information and a source of entertainment. It is therefore no surprise that the hotel industry is taking notice of smartphones and using them to enhance the customer experience. But how exactly is the industry going about this?

Mobile Websites

The simplest way in which hotels are adapting their mobile strategies is through creating intuitive mobile websites. Because so many people now use their smartphones to access the web, it makes sense for businesses, including hotels, to be better prepared for mobile visitors.

Hotel guests are also likely to search for hotels online when they are on the road and do not have access to a computer. By making sure that their websites are optimized for mobile devices, hotels can make the experience of finding their hotel and booking a room a lot more convenient.

QR Codes

Technologies like QR codes are now being put to use all over the place, and hotels are not missing out on these. QR codes provide a way to quickly use a smartphone to scan a code and the user is then sent directly to a web page to get more information.

This is being put to use by hotels in areas such as their restaurants. In some hotels, customers can now find QR codes next to menu items, which they can scan to immediately get more information about the ingredients and the preparation of the food.

Smartphone Payment

Paying via smartphones is set to become one of the biggest developments in the industry over the coming years. Making payments using NFC is still in its infancy, but it is easy to see how they will take off in the near future. This is particularly useful in hotels because travelers often don’t want to carry around large amounts of cash, and paying by phone can help them to control their spending.

Image credit: http://www.hotelmanager.net

Smartphone Keys

Smartphones are even being used in place of room keys in some hotels, and this is a technology that is sure to catch on more in the future. By getting rid of room keys and allowing guests to use their smartphones to enter and lock their doors, it is just one more way in which the customer experience can be improved.

Complete Room Control

Some hotels are now taking the idea of smartphone use in hotels to a new level. Using branded apps for devices running on iOS and Android, they are coming up with solutions that allow their guests to control almost any aspect of their stay using just their mobile devices.

These include:

• Shutting the curtains in the room
• Turning down the lights
• Adjusting the thermostat
• Changing the mood settings
• Changing the TV channel
• Activating the lifts
• Getting access to local information
• Ordering room service

The Future of Hotels

Smartphone technology is being rapidly adapted by hotels across the world in order to provide their customers with a better experience, and it is easy to see how this technology will become a lot more widespread in the future as technology improves. However, the main concern for hotels is that they manage to use smartphones to enhance the customer experience without using them as a replacement for high-quality personal service. If they get this balance right, smartphone integration in hotels is almost certain to improve the experience for all guests.

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Chris McMahon is a service industry technology consultant. His articles mainly appear on service blogs where he enjoys sharing his expertise. Visit the Marriott.com website and see how they use technology to reach their customer base.

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