The value of intelligent solutions for the hospitality sector

People management is believed to be one of the toughest tasks across the globe. In a nutshell, it is also what the hospitality sector makes its living out of, with its hotel segment alone adding a retail market value of $570.18 billion globally. However, hospitality operations are quite diverse and dynamic, with every single operation being as imperative in the customer experience as the other.

Say you are a hotel owner. You will have to ensure that your each and every customer has a seamless experience throughout their stay, i.e. since the point they ‘check in’ to the point they ‘check out’ of your premises. Now, say that everything was picture-perfect all the way through, however, your customer was in a hurry during the checkout as he could potentially lose his flight. Unfortunately, no one was available at the reception and the time lost in the due process was all the difference there could have been. In another case, the stay, the service, the food… everything was perfect. However, the customer reported a theft and you were not able to trace or recover the missing item. Do you believe the customer would recommend your hotel to anyone?

Such are the complications within the hospitality segment. Also, given the opaqueness within operations, it is often hard for hospitality players to gain complete visibility of the end-to-end activities. For instance, businesses have to lose substantial chunk of their profits due to slip-and-fall-related accidents every year. In the U.S. alone, they contribute to a loss of $70 billion on an annual basis. These losses can easily be eliminated by placing a ‘Wet Floor’ sign. Hospitality players, still, have to rely on the credibility of the resources, designated managers, and security officers for such things. Or is this the only alternative available to them?

Today, the video surveillance industry is witnessing the influx of novel technological approaches, enabling them to take the next logical step in process management. Modern surveillance systems – leveraging video analytics and Artificial Intelligence – are being programmed as per the use case that they are deployed for. This automates the security and surveillance process and eliminates the dependency on human resources for the same, thereby also weeding out the related alert and omissions. This approach leads to higher precision, greater effectiveness, and leaner infrastructure, while simultaneously decreasing the cost of operations.

The sophistication of modern surveillance systems is such that they are able to recognize everything from theft, violence, restricted area intrusion, and aggressive behavior to fire hazard, medical emergency, policy negligence, and so forth. They can then generate an alert with the respective department in real-time and prevent further escalation. Such systems can also drive Business Intelligence initiatives on behalf of an organization and are also able to conduct performance analysis of its employees by monitoring their activities. This adds considerable value to a business’ end-to-end processes and enables it to administer retrospective analysis – the process of extracting any given information from historic video feeds – seamlessly.

Further adding to their ingenuity, modern surveillance systems also decrease the deployment costs while simultaneously increasing their overall effectiveness. For instance, 360^o and 180^o cameras are superior to conventional CCTV setup since they are able to replace 3-4 cameras with a single unit. A single warped video feed is generated using such camera units which is then corrected via Video Dewarping Technology. Since there is only a single video feed, it also reduces the network bandwidth requirement as well as the storage cost post deployment. This approach also eliminates blind spot by giving the complete view of the respective area.

So, the overall value added by new-age surveillance solutions to the hospitality businesses is both far-reaching and multidimensional. Perhaps, making their toughest task of ‘people management’ as simple and effective as it has never been before.

By Abhishek Kumar, Regional Director, South Asia, Oncam