I got an Amazon Echo Dot for Christmas. It’s pretty cool—plays music, gives me weather updates and so on. I could enable it to order me paper towels, but I’m not there yet. And my house is definitely of the “built in the 1930s and does not have an automated, Bluetooth-enabled heating and cooling system” type, so I can’t really sync it to turn up the thermostat.
This and other fun tech innovations have dominated the first couple weeks of the year, no doubt thanks to the annual Consumer Electronics Show, which always highlights the out-there trends and gadgets that get tech nerds salivating.
Tech that incorporates voice recognition and artificial intelligence is the star this year, according to everyone, really, and pointed out in the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s reports from the show. In particular, check out their article highlighting the CES tech news that’ll have particular relevance for hotels.
The article quotes Shawn DuBravac, chief economist of the Consumer Technology Association, with this gem: “Voice recognition, whether it’s Amazon’s Alexa or other things, makes a lot of sense in hotel rooms, where you may not know where the light switch is, you may not know how to close the blinds—we can now add some level of automation that can drastically improve the consumer experience.”
My colleague Bryan Wroten wrote about this very topic a few weeks ago, cautioning hoteliers on the privacy issues inherent in voice-command technology, and in the weeks since then, we’ve already seen one major hotelier jump on the early-adoption bandwagon.
Wynn Las Vegas announced in mid-December it would install Amazon’s Echo in all 4,748 of its guestrooms. Installation is starting in suites and will be in all rooms by this summer, the company said, and it’ll sync with environmental controls so guests can use it to control lights, temperature, drapes and the TV.
In his most recent blogs, Bryan pointed out the privacy issues at stake when hotels install this sort of tech in guest-facing spots, as well as the potential data breach issues. Today I’m prepared to say that this is just a flat-out dumb idea.
It’s all just a gimmick, people! It’s a costly way to somehow “prove” tech-forwardness. Remember the iPad? For the first few years, we heard so many stories about in-room iPad installations that would do the same thing users are promoting with the Echo—it’ll turn on the TV, control the thermostat, open the drapes, control lights, etc. Did that ever really take off in hotel guestrooms? Nope. It became an expensive extra appendage for luxury hotel guests (“I could open the drapes with my hands, but why do that when I have an iPad right here?”).
Same with the Echo. It’s unclear whether guests would ever, for example, be able to check into a hotel room and sync their own phone/Amazon Prime account with the in-room Echo, and that to me would be the only real USP (unique selling proposition) to this endeavor.
So until this is more than just a PR stunt, I’m not interested. Unless of course those Echos at the Wynn sync with Steve Wynn’s own Prime account, in which case I’d be very interested. I bet he has a sweet music collection, and not just the free stuff that I have in my Prime collection.
Am I missing something here? Some big value and return on investment for voice-recognition technology in the hotel industry that outweighs the potential headaches of privacy and data breaches? If so, let me know. Share it in the comments below, or you can email me at sricca@hotelnewsnow.com or find me on Twitter @HNN_Steph.
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