The role of wearables in hospitality

Imagine one of your hotel guests is getting ready to leave his or her room for the day, grabs a tablet from the nightstand and requests his or her car be brought around. A valet immediately receives the task and retrieves the vehicle while the guest is in the elevator. By the time the guest walks out of the lobby, the car is ready at the curb. This seamlessly connected technology is available right now with the help of wearables, such as smartwatches.

That’s right – smartwatches can play a role in your hotel environment. Samsung has partnered with Hipaax to pair TaskWatch task management platform with its wearable enterprise mobility management (WEMM) solution. The solution uses LTE-enabled Samsung Gear S3 smartwatches to help make task management seamless and secure; hotel chains like the Valencia Group are already pioneering this technology.

Valencia wanted to remove the physical barriers that laptops and tablets create between customers and employees. With smartwatches, employees don’t need to be tethered to a monitor. WEMM and custom hospitality solutions on TaskWatch enable hotel employees to have fully engaged conversations with guests before they process requests, improving face-to-face interactions and increasing profits.

However, the benefits of wearables aren’t limited to improving customer experiences. The solution also improves how you and your employees work in the following ways:

Keeping Costs Manageable

Hotel employees are mobile employees. Staff members carry trays of food, bottles of wine and piles of towels from room to room, floor to floor. Managers run back-and-forth from the lobby to various parts of the hotel to take, process and execute visitor requests.

With wearables, employees don’t have to add another device to their loads because smartwatches are worn on their wrists. For individual employees, it’s one less device to worry about slipping into a toilet or shattering against the floor. For the hotel, it’s hundreds of dollars saved in replacements or repairs.

Seamless Security

The Samsung SDS WEMM solution is configured so that the consumer functionalities of the watch are disabled. Employees can’t listen to music, which helps keep them focused on their jobs. It also reduces the temptation to take the devices home.

If the watch were stolen, the Samsung Knox framework inside the device lets IT remotely wipe the data. The same procedure would work for lost devices as well, and you’d even be able to use the GPS feature to locate and recover missing watches.

Efficiency and Improved Experiences

The WEMM solution at Valencia is tied to a tablet. When guests check into their rooms, tablets are sitting on their beds. The tablets are customized as guests’ first and last names are reprogrammed into the devices; they can order food from room service, ask for extra towels from housekeeping and request anything else they might need from the front desk. These requests then get sent from the room to employee smartwatches.

Push-to-talk capability is integrated into the employee wearable devices and that eliminates the need for employees to carry radios to collaborate with various team members. Employees wear the device at the beginning of their shift to remain contextually aware – whether it’s their supervisor asking them to accomplish a task, a guest requesting attention or on-premise sensors triggering task alerts.

The solution streamlines task management by sending requests directly to the employees who need to execute them. Multiple employees never make the mistake of completing the same task because once one employee accepts a request, the task is removed from the smartwatch’s dashboard for the rest of the team.

Task management using TaskWatch is just one way that hotels are using WEMM to achieve a truly connected hospitality experience. What trends do you see shaping the way wearable technology is used at hotels and beyond? Join the conversation by tweeting us at @SamsungSDSA and @SamsungBizUSA: