With hundreds of thousands of hotels around the world, it is difficult to get a genuine overview of how advanced (or not) they are on digitising their services.
Some 8,000 hotels in the US were surveyed recently by the American Hotel & Lodging Association, to try and understand what steps they are taking to enhance guest acquisition and services with technology.
The study has a decent sample size, so the results are a reasonably good indicator of some broader trends affecting both chains and independent properties.
Here are some of the headline findings:
- Fewer hotels are using social media for marketing purposes, falling from a high of 93% in 2014 to 87% in 2016.
- The number of hotels charging for in-room wifi has fallen from 11% in 2014 to just 9% in 2016.
- Almost all (98%) of hotels offer high-speed in-room wifi.
- Around two-thirds (65%) of properties offer check-in via a mobile device. Still, usage of such a service comes mostly from the leading four hotel chains.
- Just a handful (around 5%) of hotels still do not use a central reservation system to handle bookings.
- High-definition or flat-screen televisions are available in 88% of hotel rooms.