Simply having an app is not a mobile strategy. Businesses need to think about mobile broadly—about all screens and devices and the impact on staff—says Christoph Heyn, director of mobile and digital guest experience at The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company LLC.

Heyn discussed the hotel company’s mobile strategy and app initiatives at Eye for Travel’s Mobile & Innovation in Travel conference in earlier this year.

Ritz-Carlton, a brand of Marriott International LLC, offers plenty of mobile features, but so do many of its competitors, Heyn says. The difference, he says, is in the execution, such as educating the entire 35,000-member staff during a mobile orientation week. During the mobile week, Ritz-Carlton discussed the importance of mobile technology to the travel industry. Plus, all 5,000 front desk employees went through additional mobile training, such as how to fulfill and respond to mobile requests, Heyn says.  

“Make mobile a part of your company’s DNA,” Heyn says. “If your employees are excited about this and know how mobile works for you as a company, your guests will get it. Your customers will get it.”

The hotel chain’s customers are using some of its mobile services. When a guest books her stay, Ritz-Carlton sends her an email inviting her to use her mobile device to check in and out, and 18% do one or both, Heyn says. Between 8-9% of Ritz-Carlton bookings come from mobile devices, he says. Full guest engagement, a metric calculated from guest surveys that Heyn says is the most important statistic for the company, is up 7 percentage points for guests who use mobile. Full guest engagement measures and evaluates guest sentiment toward the brand. Full engagement is the highest level and means those travelers are loyal to the Ritz-Carlton brand, Heyn says.

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The new mobile components are connected with the hotel’s property-management software system, so when a guest checks out housekeeping is immediately alerted via a message board on each floor to clean his room. The hotel is working on having that alert go to an associate’s device. 

Ritz-Cartlon is also piloting contactless payments with Apple Pay at some of its hotels at check-in. Heyn says the system works, but the process takes too long at present, he says, as there is some bugs in the system to work out.  

Seven Ritz-Carlton hotels are also piloting beacons to send messages to guests but are still experimenting with the types of messaging. A beacon is a small piece of hardware that pinpoints the location of a traveler a Bluetooth Low Energy wireless networking technology. That allows a hotel to send mobile offers and provide information based on the traveler’s location.

 

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 Follow mobile business journalist April Dahlquist, associate editor, mobile, at Mobile Strategies 360, @Mobile360April

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