- Good morning, good afternoon, good evening to everyone.
Thank you for joining us at the CES 2021.
I am Neha Jaitpal, Global Account Director,
Hotel Segment, here at Schneider Electric.
Today, I will be sharing a few thoughts
on how to leverage technology to boost confidence
to welcome back guests to your hotels.
We know that hotels have already implemented significant changes
to health and safety protocols
in response to the coronavirus pandemic.
Today, we will look at ways to go beyond the basics.
Let's look at the four key areas
that Scheider's EcoStruxure for hotel solutions
focuses on to bring value to our hotel customers globally.
We enable our customers to draw the golden line
between an enhanced guest experience and improved operational efficiency.
All the way along we help them achieve
their sustainability goals and aspirations.
And providing them resiliency and peace of mind.
Moving on, let's look at the three bricks
of our Healthy Hotel Solution:
One, guest and staff wellbeing;
two, touchless control;
three, space management solutions.
Here's a helicopter view of our solution,
and let's take a peak inside the guestroom.
You will find our connected room solutions for hotel,
the brain of the system that allows us
to monitor and control the room parameters.
Room conditions adjust automatically when the rooms are unoccupied.
That translates into savings.
Then, when the guest returns,
the settings quickly restore to previous,
for a seamless experience.
These savings add up quickly when they automatically happen
for each and every guestroom.
Secondly, maintenance issues can be identified proactively
so they can be addressed quickly and remotely,
even before the guest complains.
While you are benefiting from creator efficiency,
your guests will enjoy a personalized, tailored,
and customized experience.
For HVAC control,
we have SE8000 Room Controllers,
TH o TC series of thermostats,
and Glass touch panel,
that allows temperature control in the room.
With our sensors and a light audit or consultation services
you can monitor air quality and improve efficiency
in your hotel.
Here is the bedside control solution,
that is not only durable but also easy to clean.
Which is one single touch point by the bed
for easy control of lights, blinds, scenes,
and other services like make your room and do not disturb.
Should a guest want to snooze,
they can simply touch the do not disturb button.
That disables the doorbell
and lets the housekeeping staff know not to disturb the guest.
On the other hand, if the guest wants the room to be refreshed,
they can touch the make my room button
that notifies the front desk or housekeeping staff
about the request.
With partnerships and integrations we can provide
touchless and bring-your-own-device experience for your guest
so that they don't have to touch any peripheral room devices.
Moving on to the public areas in the hotel.
Our space management solutions can provide monitoring and control
of occupancy and quality of air in your hotel.
The very first block under guest and staff wellbeing
is an antibacterial and durable range of switches and sockets.
The first touch point when you enter your non-automated hotel guestroom
is a master switch to turn on the lights.
At Schneider Electric, we have a range of switches and sockets
that are not only antibacterial, but also durable,
with surfaces that can be easily wiped down,
according to the cleaning protocols set by the hotel brand.
The second block under guest and staff wellbeing is air quality.
With our wellbeing analytics we can monitor
indoor air quality, temperature, humidity, CO2, VOC,
and easily pinpoint areas inside the hotel that need attention.
Furthermore, we also provide audit and consultation services
of the HVAC system.
Here, we advice what controls can be implemented,
and what modifications could be made to the system,
either mechanically or via our control systems
for improved efficiency.
For example, let's take a look at the enhanced filtration
with coil sanitization via ultraviolet germicidal irradiation.
Let's look at this air shoot,
where you see the return air from the building
and the fresh air coming through the damper control
that gets pushed through the filter.
Then it goes through the coil
and finally passes through the UVC emitters
that destroy mold, bacteria, viruses, etc.
Because of these UVC emitters
you can supply clean air to the building.
Along with this, we have a partner solution
which is a portable or wired UVC light solution
to sterilize high-touch points inside the guestroom or public areas,
like lobby, gyms, elevators, etc.
It is a BACnect capable device
connected to our EcoStruxure Building Operation solutions.
This solution acts as a secondary layer of disinfection
and provides additional peace of mind
without replacing existing cleaning protocols.
Our second brick in the technology stack
is touchless control.
A big thanks to our connectivity ecosystem partners,
Assa Abloy, Somfy and Danfoss.
We now have an ecosystem that provides
an integrated, simple, and seamless connectivity experience
inside the guestroom.
We have three options for touchless control,
and the first one is pretty straightfoward.
It's a holistic approach with our connected room solution for hotels,
sensors, blind control, and door lock integration.
Because of this we can provide welcome scenes
and preset temperature on arrival,
so that the guest doesn't have to touch any peripheral devices
before they wipe off the surfaces.
The second option is Bring Your Own Device,
where the room control is provided in the palm of the guest
with just their mobile phone!
With integration with your hotel's loyalty app
the guest can now control temperature, blinds, TV, etc.,
from their own mobile device.
The third option is voice controlled rooms.
Thanks to our partnership with Volara we can now deliver
the true touchless experience inside the guestrooms.
Moving on to our last brick: space management solutions.
Here we measure space utilization and allow the guests and staff
to safely socially distance from each other,
as well as improve operational efficiency.
Our space management software counts people in real time
for all the areas across the hotel.
Thus, by monitoring occupancy
we are able to set capacity thresholds.
Should the occupancy go beyond the set limit,
the facility management team will be notified.
You can set interim policies on usage of amenities
like gyms, pools, restaurants, etc.,
by looking at the occupancy and people flow.
This solution comes with an engagement tool called Communicate.
It's a direct line of communication for the hotel staff
to share news and updates, and can selectively notify staff
depending on their role within the organization.
You can analyze target versus actual occupancy levels
to change set points for HVAC and reduce energy consumption.
You can direct housekeeping resources to focus on areas
that need cleaning services.
To that end, our technology enables you to provide a safe environment.
That is a peace of mind that the guest of today needs and demands.
As you can see, we are helping our customers
create the blueprint for buildings of the future,
where the properties are sustainable, resilient, hyper-efficient,
and most importantly, people-centric.
I would now like to welcome Randy Gaines,
Senior Vice President of Operations and New Openings at Hilton,
to share how Hilton is accelerating their digital transformation journey
to welcome back guests with confidence, build resiliency,
maximizing operational efficiency
and meet ever-evolving sustainability goals.
So, Randy, 2020 was certainly an interesting year.
And what are the challenges faced by the hospitality industry
due to Covid-19?
- Great question, Neha; 2020 has certainly been a challenging year.
When we started 2020, we started out strong.
If you look at January and February,
we were tracking to have in the hospitality sector
one of our most successful years.
We'd had 60 straight months of constant growth in our industry.
And then, all of a sudden, the pandemic came.
And travel stopped.
We really didn't know what to expect in March
as things started to unfold as it related to Covid and the situation.
But we had to react quickly.
And at Hilton, we first and foremost
had to take a few steps to protect ourselves.
We had to protect our business, we had to protect our people,
and we had to protect our assets.
As you know, travel completely stopped as a result of this crisis.
We had to shut down over 95% of our managed porfolia.
And several other things were shut down in our business as well.
Life was just at a standstill.
Hilton leaned in.
We knew that the first responders were out there,
so we decided to give away a million room nights
to first responders and other folks.
We decided to lean into this situation
and made the choice to lead the hospitality sector.
We worked with our owners and other stakeholders.
We knew many of them wouldn't come out of this.
Many would have financial crises that would cause them
to possibly shut their doors or their businesses for ever.
So we had to be very nimble on our responsiveness
as many of our construction sites were slowing down,
a lot of our openings were pausing.
Our business was just slowing down, we had to react.
We had to react quickly, by protecting
those assets, protecting that business.
It was very important when the world essentially came to a stop
that we protected ourselves from a cash perspective.
Partnering with our businesses, with stakeholders,
protecting our people, protecting our assets.
That was our first mission.
We unfortunately had to furlough 75% of our workforce
and shut down many of the hotels I mentioned.
We did not know how long this was going to last,
but we knew it was not going to be a short-term crisis.
And we had to plan for the worst of the long-term situation.
- That's an interesting take.
What are the key priorities for Hilton today,
and what measures are you taking to boost the guest confidence?
- Coming into this pandemic, our priorities have always been the same:
it's to protect our business, to protect our people,
and to protect our assets.
We had to make difficult decisions throughout this process.
We have to operate the hotels differently.
We had to peel back all the layers of our brand standards
and how we run the hotels
from a cleanliness and safety perspective.
Looking at the wellbeing of our customers first and foremost.
We have a partnership with Lysol.
We partnered with them and created a program called Hilton Clean Stay.
It was an overlay of all of those daily cleaning tasks
that we perform at our hotels.
We added an extra layer of cleanliness and safety with Lysol.
So what we do is we clean the room now,
we add that extra layer, put a sign on the door,
and then we walk away.
The traditional daily housekeeping that is performed,
we had to take a step back from that; it's different.
We also created something called Hilton Event Ready.
We feel we are in the early recovery phases of our group business.
And in this program we designed and created a safe environment
for returning customers to come back to those meeting spaces.
We enhanced our cleaning protocols, we peeled back our standards,
we implemented new technologies to keep people safe.
Now, I'll talk about those technologies later.
What's very important right now
is that the customer feels safe about coming to our hotels.
That's a very different feeling now than everyone had a year ago.
We have to ensure our hotels
have great safety measures in place
to create a safe environment.
We took a close look at our air filtration systems
and how we were addressing those areas
and other surfaces around the hotel.
We had to put together communications protocols
for all our stakeholders
to ensure they understand
how we were protecting them from this virus.
Protecting our team members is a big part of what we are.
It's what makes Hilton successful.
That's why Hilton
is the number one company to work for in the United States.
And ultimately, there is a reason for that.
Therefore, it was crucial for us
to make provisions for our team members
to make sure that they were operating in a safe environment.
Now that we are opening back our hotels,
we have worked closely with the American Hotel and Lodging Association
to set the tone for the industry
as to how we open hotels and stabilize hotels.
We've worked with our partners in this.
As an industry, we really came together,
and Hilton has been leading the way.
Our leadership and teams
have had a steady hand on the wheel
even through our company's worst times.
We've gotten smaller, but we've pulled together.
And with rigor and perseverance we'll get through this.
- You summed that up pretty well.
So, what changes are you making
in the way you operate and build hotels,
and how are you using technology
to accelerate digital transformation and innovation journey?
- I've talked about the early stages of where we are
and how we had to level up our standards
by creating a safe environment for everyone.
The game changer coming out of this
is to accelerate digital transformations and innovations.
We needed to innovate and elevate
our partnerships with groups like you.
We use the EcoStruxure Building Solutions to make sure
that we have a quality environment
for the guests and all our team members.
We have been also working with your space management solutions group
on many different pilots.
We've piloted several solutions together
and come up with air quality solutions that are foolproof.
If you add the EcoStruxure building systems
it enables you to certify
that added layer of protection and certification.
Overlay this with the existing building automation,
and controls that we have, and components,
that we've worked on for many years,
it allows us to move into a passive environment.
And that is certainly something that we can brand as a group.
We are also working on things that will differentiate us:
The smart building space.
We're working on robotics,
and how we can innovate some of your robotic products.
As we start to move out of this pandemic
there will be many products that will be game changers
and differentiators for all of us,
and that is why it's important that the hotel of the future
is created by things that we are piloting and testing together.
These tests lay the foundation for what is going to be
the minimum standard in two to three years for our industry.
Let's all commit to a better future
by setting the tone with EcoStruxure systems,
space management systems,
and other technologies that you have to offer.
That is going to help us carve the way
and shape the future for the entire hospitality industry.
- Thank you, Randy, for joining us today, and I'm sure
our viewers have enjoyed this conversation
and found this discussion insightful.
A big thank you to everyone watching us today,
and please visit the link below to get in touch
to learn more about our Healthy Hotel Solutions.