Mobile and self-service customer support aren’t yet a reality at the great luxury hotels of today. This is in spite of the expectations of today’s customers, and of the dominant customers of the very near future: the uniquely large millennial generation of customers: young people born 1980-2000 who will soon be the majority in the all-important “frequent business traveler” classification.
Luxury hotels: A particular kind of magic trick
To me, this slow luxury adoption is understandable, up to a point. Because a luxury hotel is a particular kind of a magic trick. It’s the transformation of what by rights should be a commodity — a rectangular room, a ceiling, a toilet that often flushes properly – into something else: a place where lodgers become guests, where relationships are refreshed, where memories are created.
Luxury hotels have always accomplished this through personally delivered service: through exquisitely trained humans who remember guest names, who are alert to mood changes in guests, who strive to serve not only what a guest directly asks for, but what the guest may not even know they’re looking for.
Fitting mobile, automated, and self-service offerings into this high-touch luxury scenario is touchy. There’s more, it would seem, that can go wrong than can go right, a reality that has kept most luxury lodging brands uneager to rush in. While some smaller five stars have made at least the partial leap (Auberge Resorts, which I profiled here, has offered iPad-based room service ordering for some time, and in the same article, Andaz by Hyatt discusses their employee-managed tablet-based check-in), the dominant sentiment is the one that Christopher Hunsberger, EVP of Global Products and Innovation for Four Seasons Hotels And Resorts candidly shared with me. “We [at Four Seasons] usually don’t try to be first" with these types of initiatives; “we’re…studying, watching, and seeing what happens with others…when we do bring our mobile app to market, we [hope to have] learned from mistakes that others have made.”
Today’s Ritz-Carlton announcement
But today a luxury brand, the 86-property Ritz-Carlton Hotels And Resorts, has announced that it’s willing to be first out of the gate in mobilizing, so to speak, the luxury experience for its guests.
Ritz-Carlton is rolling out mobile poolside ordering, mobile room service, app-based service requests (replacing that toothbrush you accidentally discarded, the extra washcloth, soaps, shoeshine touch-up you need before dinner), real-time device-agnostic folio review, mobile check-in, mobile check-out, and a nifty little “sharing the experience/sharing the memories” feature.
Let’s look at some of these features, as well as how (and if) they fit into the magic trick that is a luxury hotel at its best.
Shareable Experiences
One aspect of the mobile rollout goes in a different direction than you might expect. Rather than being transactionally oriented, it offers a chance to help guests build and share memories. With Shareable Experiences, Ritz-Carlton guests can modify and enhance their travel photos with digital stamps, titles, and filters (specific to the particular property and geographic location) to create retro travel posters to share via social media or save as digital souvenirs.
This fits with a theme that I’ve found prevalent among today’s and tomorrow’s travelers: The need for a company to be a conduit for relationships between guests, as well as between guests and their off-property friends and network.
Mobile check-in
Mobile check-in at the Ritz-Carlton starts with providing the guest with a personalized one-click link the day before arrival. Enter your anticipated arrival time and phone number, and at the appropriate time you’ll get an SMS message to confirm that your room is ready, at which point you go to “mobile check-in” to pick up your keys. No further registration needed unless required by law and no additional credit card swipe.
The thing is, this being the Ritz-Carlton, the current front-desk scenario, without all this new mobile check-in functionality, is hardly a hardship. The odds of having to wait in line for a surly, gum-chewing, distracted front desk clerk at the Ritz-Carlton or one of its estimable competitors is less likely than a direct lightning strike on an underground bunker.
The guest stays in the moment and in control
So what does mobile check-in buy you as a luxury hotel guest? Well, it offers some functionality that travelers (including, the Ritz-Carlton tells me, the luxury travelers with whom they’ve spent two years researching and planning this app) appreciate: It allows these guests to handle their transactional details themselves, on a self-service basis, checking that everything is just as they want it (no more “is the card I have on file the one you want to use?” kind of gentle runaround, no more mis-typing of hard to spell guest names, no more inability to double-check reservation details on your own). As Ed French, Ritz-Carlton’s Chief Sales and Marketing Officer, says, "Now when you check in on mobile, the arrival experience is focused on conversation about your trip purpose as we hand you your key, not you watching our keystrokes.” Which may give the guest a more comfortable feeling of being both in the moment and in control.
Poolside ordering
Now, picture this. You’re poolside at the Ritz-Carlton. You can’t track down one of their Ladies or Gentlemen (employees), so you have to shlep all the way (20 yards) to the pool bar, order your drink, and tote that barge of tonic and gin all the way back to your poolside chair and umbrella.
Tough, isn’t it?
It’s also unlikely. The reality is, this “my kingdom for a waiter’s attention” scenario almost never happens at the Ritz-Carlton or one of their top competitors—the above-mentioned Four Seasons and Auberge for example. Rather, their employees are famously trained to recognize the most subtle eye contact or nod of a head, and come over to assist youbefore you need to ask for a thing. And, of course, it is their pleasure (as they’ll undoubtedly tell you) to carry your drink, sandwich, or whatnot back to where you are perched and literally not moving a muscle.
So what, exactly, in this scenario makes you think you need the assistance of an app? Well, probably nothing, once you have experience there with the caliber of the human service that is at your command. It’s something else that makes you crave app-based service: Habit. Expectations from the rest of your device-driven life. A desire for a more modern vibe. A desire for direct control.
Minor as these reasons may sound, they’re real. A preference for handling the transactional part of a customer interaction is something I’ve uncovered repeatedly in my research on today’s changing customer base, as a customer service consultant, author, and speaker.
Which makes the Ritz-Carlton mobile service initiative important for the brand. It’s what Nancy Reagan might have called a gateway drug. A gateway drug to anticipatory customer service.
Of course, the Ladies and Gentlemen at the Ritz-Carlton don’t talk that way, so let me let them talk for a moment. Ed French again: ”Our vision is to bring our legendary personalized service experience to our guests through their smartphones – not to replace our services with the smartphone.”
Yeah, that sounds more elegant than “gateway drug,” I admit.
Micah Solomon is a customer service consultant, hospitality industry speaker, and the author most recently of High-Tech, High-Touch Customer Service
