Hinfo vs. In-Room Hotel TV Compendiums

 

Hinfo opens a world of possibilities for your guests to communicate with you and stay informed, compared to in-room TV compendiums.

Hotel TV Compendiums have many limitations when it comes to accessibility, cost, and the depth of interaction/details you can provide.

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 TV compendium 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.

Individual Access for Every Single Guest

As of mid 2021, there are now over 4.6 billion smartphones and tablets in use 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 a TV 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.

Did you know that the electricity used to charge the average smartphone is the equivalent of watching a Full HDTV for just 7 minutes?

When you factor in that the average smartphone has 5 hours of screen on time, the energy consumption to just view your compendium details will be next to none on a smartphone compared to a TV.

Auto Translate

There are some Hotel TV solutions that support multiple languages, but they come with a catch.


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.


Most Hotel TV solutions only support a couple of languages beyond English.


Translating your details to each respective language requires these Hotel TV providers to outsource the manual translating, which adds significant time and cost to this process of including and updating details.

Our Hinfo service addresses each of these issues with ease:


Hinfo reads your guests own devices language, to provide the relevant details (if supported), which removes this additional step.


Hinfo supports 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.


Our Auto Translate service is an optional extra, at minimal cost, which translates 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 TV Compendium, is only beneficial if the guest is both in the room and watching the TV.

In many cases, they even need to have the on-screen compendium interface visible.

Hinfo allows you to schedule notifications ahead of time to make guests aware when they matter most, wherever they are.

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

Keyword Search

No two properties use the same headings and terminology for their compendium details.

With hotel TV packages today, the number of details that you can provide to your guests is ‘very minimal’. This is due to the navigation input of D-Pad and enter button on the remote and minimizing the amount of input from the guest, to view these details.

With keyword search built into our Hinfo service, your guests can now search for the details they are looking for with a full QWERTY keyboard, which results in finding the details they are looking for, faster than ever before.

Dial Phone Numbers, Get Directions and View Webpages Instantly

If you like to learn more about a local restaurant listed on the in-room TV, including visiting their website, then phone to book a table and/or look up driving/walking directions to that restaurant, what is the first thing they would do for each of these?

They would 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.

Guest Messaging

Imagine if in-room TV compendiums had a messaging service between each room and your reception staff, which would require them to use an on-screen keyboard with the D-Pad and Enter button.

Most guests in this case would give up halfway or just back out of it.

Hinfo allows your guests to send a message to your reception staff, from anywhere, by providing only their first name and room number.

This provides your guests the option of not needing to go to reception to ask a quick question and both your staff and guests can respond in their own time.

Emergency Details

Compendiums can provide valuable details in the case of an emergency, including the best local hospital, where the local doctor is, how to react in the case of a natural disaster etc.

Many Hotel TV compendiums do not accommodate for these types of details to be included and if they were, guests would more than likely need these critical details when they are off-site.

With Hinfo being accessible from your guests own smartphones, they can now immediately access emergency-based details, which includes your property’s recommendations for best local services, at a moment’s notice.

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 TV compendium interfaces use dark colours all the time, without much opportunity for personalizing to complement your property’s branding.

To allow for this, you need have both a light/day mode which 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.

Cost Effective

Now that you understand what is unique to our hotel compendium format compared to TV-based 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 be provided in each guest room.

TV-based solutions require installing an adapter to the back of your TV to communicate with your property’s internal network for information updates etc.

These adapters are costly, depending on the specs of each and if they are to support a Full HDTV (1080p) or a 4K TV.

To conclude, Hinfo not only costs substantially less than hotel TV solutions, but it can be accessed by your guests from anywhere (even within their own guest room) along with several real-world benefits.

To learn more about our Hinfo service via a copy of our beginner’s guide or request a demo, please send us an enquiry via our website.