Hinfo vs. In-Room Hotel Tablets

 

Hinfo opens a world of possibilities for your guests to communicate with you and stay informed during their stay, compared to in-room hotel tablets.

Hotel Tablet solutions are not by any means the most cost-effective method, which is why they haven’t had much traction outside of luxury properties with hundreds of rooms.

Not only is it a costly exercise going down that route, but it also has many of the same restrictions as other compendium formats.

By the end of this post, you will have a solid understanding of what our Hinfo Guest Digital Solution has to offer, that is not possible with any in-room hotel tablet solution.

Guest Access Anywhere

Hinfo is accessible on all the electronic devices your guests bring to your property via our mobile app and web-based solution.

All your guests’ smartphones, tablets, laptop computers etc. can now access your property and local area details/services from anywhere.

With guests carrying their smartphones everywhere they go and 97% of guests accessing our service via their smartphone, providing an easily accessible solution to your guests is now more viable than ever before.

Fully Contactless Solution

In this post pandemic world, the hotel tablet you provide in each guest room are less than ideal for on-going maintenance.

These tablets now require a thorough clean on each guest changeover which adds significant time, labour, and cost to your cleaning staff’s operations.

At Hinfo, we believe that minimizing the number of surfaces you need to clean thoroughly on every guest changeover, will result in improved time efficiency and less stress for your housekeeping staff.

Individual Access for Every Single Guest

As of mid 2021, there are now over 4.6 billion smartphones and tablets being used regularly worldwide.

Your guests are already bringing their own devices to use during their stay, including smartphones, tablets, and laptops.

This means your guests no longer need to wait their turn, to view the details most important to them, on the single hotel tablet in each guest room.

Environmentally Friendly

A growing trend in the last decade is to become more environmentally sustainable for everything in our daily lives.

With our Hinfo service being accessible from the devices your guests already own, there is no longer a need to provide dedicated hardware, just to improve communication with your guests during their stay.

Removing the need to provide dedicated hardware in each room that needs to be handled frequently, also eliminates any other potential costs and time-related issues for fixing/replacing any broken components with these devices that the guests do not own.

This may include charging ports and their docking stations, shattered screens, broken backs, or even unforeseen software issues.

Real-Auto Translate

Most hotel tablet solutions support multiple languages, but they come with a catch.

  1. Either guests need to select their preferred language (if supported) upon arrival, or the language needs to be set by the reception staff during check-in.
  2. Most tablet-based solutions only support a handful of languages beyond English at most.
  3. Translating your details to each respective language requires either you or these hotel tablet providers to outsource the manual translating, which adds significant time and cost to this process of updating and including details.

Our Hinfo service addresses each of these issues with ease:

  1. Hinfo reads your guests own devices language to provide the relevant details (if supported), which removes this additional step.
  2. Hinfo support 15 languages plus English, which covers the dominant language from almost all the Top 25 countries travelling overseas to Australia, New Zealand, United Kingdom and United States each year.
  3. Our Auto Translate service is an optional extra at minimal cost, which will translate your compendium details during initial setup and updates in minutes, not weeks and is just as accurate as a human translator.

Notifications

Providing time sensitive notifications to your guests via an in-room hotel tablet, is only beneficial if the guest is in the room and not down by the pool, at your in-house restaurant or even off-site.

Hinfo allows you to schedule notifications ahead of time to make guests aware when they matter most, wherever they are, since they will receive these on their own smartphones.

For example, promoting your specials at your in-house restaurant, 1–2 hours before dinner service.

Dial Phone Numbers and Get Directions Instantly

If you like to learn more about a local restaurant listed in the hotel tablet you can easily view their website to view their menu etc.

However, what if the guest then wants to phone to book a table and/or get directions to that restaurant. What do they do?

They immediately grab their smartphone!

Hinfo allows your guests to view webpages, get directions and dial phone numbers instantly, for all local places/events and services listed, creating a more seamless experience.

Dark Mode

A new trend in the last couple of years for smartphones and tablets is support for a dark/night mode where you have primarily white text on a black or dark grey background.

Some hotel tablet interfaces use dark coloured backgrounds all the time, without any opportunity for personalizing to complement your property’s branding.

To allow for this, you need to have both a light/day mode that has white backgrounds with black text and uses your property’s primary colours, along with a separate dark/night mode to reduce the strain on your guests’ eyes at night.

Our Hinfo service accommodates for this by respecting the guest’s choice if they have dark/night mode enabled on their own device, either manually or via a time schedule.

Minimal Internet Usage and Offline Support

Many hotel tablets also require a consistent internet connection to view any details on the device that can be updated at your management end.

Given that no property is updating their compendium details, restaurant menus and guest services available on offer every 2 seconds, why does every device need to redownload the same details?

Our Hinfo apps are designed to save all details about your property and the local area offline, when guests search for your property on our service via your property name or based on their current location when on-site.

This also reduces the amount of internet download your guests need each time they view your compendium details, which results in a faster service and saves data from their Wi-Fi allowance.

Cost Effective

Now that you understand what is unique to our hotel compendium format compared to hotel tablet solutions, you must be thinking that this must come at a premium.

This is not the case at all, because we can provide an upgrade that is more accessible and better value for money overall, by eliminating the need for any costly hardware to provide in each guest rooms and forced software integrations.

Hotel Tablet solutions require either renting or buying the tablet hardware outright for each room, plus additional costs for the software integration.

This means after multiple years, you would either own tablets that look worn out and respond slowly or spend thousands of dollars on tablet hardware that your property does not own in the long term.

To conclude, the value for money proposition of hotel tablets is only justifiable for a tiny fraction of properties in the world and they do not fully meet the real-world requirements for guests, including being accessible from anywhere they are during their stay, not just in their guest room.

To request a copy of our beginner’s guide or a demo, please send us enquiry on our website.

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