The Student Hotel is an innovative student housing project that marries the luxury of a boutique hotel with the simplicity of a student dormitory. The hotel provides an all-inclusive service, including on-site shared kitchens, study areas, gyms and washing facilities. These combined give students a peace of mind and create an ideal living situation
In its infancy, the student hotel had a simple, yet effective online plan. Short term and semester bookings were all arranged through the Hotel’s website while the popular social media platform, Facebook, was used to connect hotel guests. Online payment was also possible after being redirected to a third party payment platform. Disaggregating the services proved to be a successful strategy and was the preferred solution for a number of years.
The introduction of the new online portal has sparked some debate amongst hotel guests. While the online payment and maintenance request processes seemed to have soared above all expectations, the platform has fallen short on many other aspects of desired performance.
Our research findings point out that the portal’s lack of success can be explained by the strong correlation between the low portal usage and low portal likability (not causation). Guests believe that there should be an improvement in the system lagging problems, the user-unfriendly interface and the social element of the portal. In addition to these, other main features that students would like to see introduced are a laundry top-up and online payment system for meals and the possibility to reserve on site services like the ‘Classroom’ and ‘Kitchen’ online.
The previous findings suggest the way forward for the hotel’s information strategy is through a three tier approach. This approach outlines the creation of a mobile application, complemented with website access. Online payment, NFC services and convenience services will form the three crucial elements of the approach.
Introducing an NFC-enabled mobile application and website, hotel guests, the majority of whom are smartphone users, will be more inclined to make use of the technology during their stay. Hotels can only improve their processes and services if they have enough information. For this reason, the use of NFC tags across the hotel opens the opportunity to collect data from guests’ behaviour and system usage. The implementation will also create greater levels of satisfaction among guests as they will have more control over which services they would like to use – it also offers an innovative way to check into the hotel, acting as an access card. So whether it is strategically finding the right time to do your laundry or reserving a table at the Kitchen and paying the bill, the mobile application and website should give guests a whole new experience at the hotel.
This technology transformation should propel The Student Hotel into the future and help it maintain its status as technological leader in the local accommodation industry. We would like to thank The Student Hotel and all the ones involved in making this analysis possible.
Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqtWtxRlozw
Team:
379149sl Shannon Lofgren
379156mo Matt Overtveld
379207jl Jake Lagaay
382073sd Sergio Di Giacinto
