There’s nothing like a bit of luxury when staying at a nice hotel. Be it in-room dining or the staff waiting on your every need, feeling like a king for a day is a matter of taking advantage of the hotel’s services. Unfortunately, the systems in place for requesting such things are years behind, teetering on the edge of archaic. You can stare at the minuscule writing on the phone handset in hopes that dialing the listed numbers won’t throw you into an infinite loop of forwards and “accidental” hang ups or, at some hotels, you can click your way through a sluggish and ancient feeling TV interface. They may as well be using pneumatic tubes.
Runtriz, a software firm out of Hollywood, CA, is aiming to bring hotels up to speed. Following a series of quiet test runs at other LA hotels, they’ve debuted a product called “Hotel Evolution” at the Malibu Beach Inn in Malibu, CA. When a guest checks into the hotel, they’re asked if they have an iPhone or iPod Touch. If they do, the hotel staff will load the Runtriz Hotel web application to the device. If they don’t, they’re given a 16gb iPod Touch (with the application pre-loaded, of course) to keep for the duration of their stay.
Once you’ve punched in your room number and security code, all of the hotel’s service offerings are but a click away. Straight from the device’s screen, you can order room service, set a wake up call, request your luggage, dry cleaning, or car (or if you’re going all out, a limo), request linens or toiletries, check your messages, or set your room to “Do Not Disturb”. They also provide information about nearby nightlife, attractions, and shopping.
Rather than attempting to jailbreak each and every guest’s iPhone or brave their way through Apple’s app store approval process, they opted to go with a web application. Beyond simplifying installation, this also allows them to upgrade and maintain the application remotely by modifying the site, without any sort of manual upgrades required on the hotel’s end. It also facilitates portability; when they add support for other platforms (such as Android, or BlackBerry) in the future, it’s a matter of simply tweaking the layout for each browser, rather than rewriting an entire application.
The cost of getting such a system up and running varies on a hotel-by-hotel basis. According to Matt Allard, president of Runtriz, the cost of the first month is generally about double that of the standard monthly fee of $10 per room.
While I like the idea already, where it truly flourishes is in its scalability. At the launch party, I overheard talks of migrating the idea to a sports arena, or otherwise extending it beyond the realm of hotels - still good ideas, but the concept can extend far beyond implementation at individual locations. Imagine in just a few years, when all of the major browsers will likely be location-aware (via a “This website wants to know your location” security prompt), and more consumers are comfortable and familiar with the idea of location based services on mobile handsets. Something like this could be a full-blown concierge for your life, adapting its offerings based on your location. It could offer the basics regardless of where you are, but step into an established (via partnership) geofence, and the functionality expands to include location-specific options, with the application icon lighting up to alert you of the changes. It wouldn’t happen overnight (current technical limitations aside, it would require a ton of partnerships to be truly useful), but I imagine such things making our lives a whole lot easier within the foreseeable future.
???
Isn’t this what the TV and the remote in every hotel room I’ve ever stayed in, is for?
Plus, you want to break into the sports arena game? So does Cisco and Vividsky and about a dozen others…good luck!
Sorry, this is about $3’s late on an idea that is already well into implementation. I’m so sick of seeing “hey, we can develop this for the iPhone” mentality, just because it can be.
How about we start with a fully vetted business plan and competitive analysis before blowing out a ‘tool’ (and yes, I mean tool) like this.
Weak.
FYI: You need to fix the RSS feed for TechCrunch when you’re pulling posts from MobileCrunch.
How so? Looks good to me
all the posts are in html when we use rss readers like google reader. This only happen with posts that were not from Techcrunch.com
How useless. Picking the phone and dialing, say, room service takes about, an average, what, three seconds. Putting up do not disturb sign, one second. All of the services are available on seconds via the telephone.
There is no problem to be solved here.
Powering up a mobile device and using app to reach hotel services could take easily minutes. Fail.
I wouldn’t say it takes minutes…running a web based app on an iphone really is instant and there have been times when I would prefer not to speak to someone…..I would rather just continue watching TV
rent a car? get a masseuse? get local travel info? get a map of the lounge? check the menu and reserve a table there?
Why an iPhone and not just a standard touch screen?
It seems like it would be just as cheap, less damage, less easy to lose to have a cheapo touch panel hooked up to their network, running the same thing.
If you were running the startup, what would you focus on, between these two options:
1. Getting people to sign up and use the service without having to worry about the hardware
2. Spending R&D funds on hardware tasks, introducing this as a new critical contingency into your business plan, and requiring more infrastructure at the hotel (power cable to this device, network connection, dealing with issues it has, etc.)
The simplicity of a handheld web browser, like the iPhone, is that people are already using websites on it, and it works. Why mess around right now? If they see a need later on, then sure, they can go ahead and do that, but the fact that they’ve got a service that is working and they can sell is worth a lot more. I don’t think most businesses that succeed are the ones with the best technology, but rather the ones that just make things happen with revenue.
what? I think you are over-exaggerating the “problems” associated with using an alternate piece of hardware. I’m not sure if you’ve experienced a/v tech within the past decade, but there are several readily available, cheap, and easy-to-program-for touchscreen remote controls that would likely be much more applicable here than the (relatively) limited audience of iphone users.
anyhow, I digress - the idea sucks shit from the get-go, iphone or not (I own an iphone 3g, still think this is stupid.).
because when every client will bring its own hardware (nextgen phone), they won’t have to care anymore
so actually this is just a giving them a iPod when they arrive
controlling stuff from a TV remote is so last century lets get a touch screen….
even through hotels website are really bad i dont think they are going to buy into this they will just try and create their own some will do it well others wont
hoteliers are people who watch the cost of shampoo they just wont spend on this unless they see a return and even then they will ditch it and go in house
good luck
John Jones
http://www.johnjones.me.uk
I can so how this would be very useful for a vacation “get-away” spa type resort. Clearly when people pay large sums of money to stay at top of the line hotels they like to see gadgets like this. I doubt however that main street hotels and motels, would upgrade to this system. With the economy on the brink of a recession I think this might be put on hold for a bit by most owners.
Like anything as the price drops it will become more common place.
What happened to just talking to, you know, a real person? Don’t get me wrong—I am by no means adverse to technology. Love it, in fact. But to do something like order room service, or a wake-up call, or any of the other things the article mentions, at a hotel, I want to just call the front desk and tell them “Hey. Can you wake me up at seven?” or “I have a suit that I’d like to have dry-cleaned”.
This seems SO much easier for ME than having to navigate some web app on an iPod. Plus, you get a chance to actually connect a little with the people behind the hotel you are staying at. Kind of like talking to a real person instead of an annoying automated phone menu that is impersonal and wastes my time.
Whether it’s easier for the hotel is another matter. And I suspect this is the core of the new app—it will probably enable the hotel to save some man-hours, which might make it a success. Kind of like using an annoying automated phone menu instead of a real person.
Hmm, you are right I guess. But personally I dont want to talk for these things.I would much rather use an automated system, even if it takes a little longer.
When phone was there in hotels to make these types of calls, maybe ppl wud have said “Dont get me wrong, so now ppl dont want to see thier faces to talk to in person, instead they just want to talk over phone?”
This is just another step ahead
Yeah, this is, if it works, going to be like the grocery stores from days of yore, at first there were only stores with a shopkeeper that gave you everything you asked for, then they had commercials and stuff to introduce the idea of taking a cart and doing the shopping yourself, and now its only the most expensive stores that have the old system… well same thing could happen to the Ipod Touch idea, except that here there is still the possibility of it not working out at all because Apple doesn’t exactly hand out its middle-class(all about the image, components, and sound, are usually average-bad despite the price) products for free.
It’s another choice for the customer. The hotel will ask for feedback from the customer. Until then, it’s just a fad.
cool
http://www.zhengzhijia.com
That is what I call forward thinking.
Pointless. I would rather call and talk to the REAL PERSON at the front desk. And if they plan to market this by claiming “it’s good for cutting costs”, I simply won’t stay at a hotel that doesn’t have a helpful front desk. I think I’ll be good for another century or two.
There is an interesting talk called “Global Mobile” at Stanford Univ. on Oct 21st, where Device Anywhere, MoBlast and KPCB’s Cyriac Roeding are on the panel. This may be a good venue for some of you to ask them questions about how to build and test applications on mobile platforms that can run anywhere in the world. Goto http://www.vlab.org for more details.
that’s awesome!
http://www.iphone4um.com
For restaurants too:
http://www.softtouchpos.com/DineBlast/DineBlast%20Mobile.pdf
This is nothing new. There has been a market for this type of stuff for years. In fact, I was CTO of a company where we developed these types of applications. The difficult part is capturing the attention of non-tech savvy clients and then being able to show some sort of value to the end-user.
We had a number of our devices in an area that had extremely high levels of foot traffic and did not get the amount of usage we thought they would. Now, to put something like this in the hospitality industry would have a more significant impact than being placed in the general public. As for the general public just wants to “play”.
These are basically advertising devices. I’m still very passionate about this industry, hopefully some day I’ll get my feet wet again.
Good idea for non native English speaker. Read and write in English is much easier than talking.
I think this is great. I do not have phones in my hotel so this would do the trick for anyone needing a special hotel service.
Better look than the PDF posted earlier
http://mobile.dineblast.com