6 Major Providers Redefining Guest Experience with In-Flight Wi-Fi
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The hospitality industry stands at crossroads of digital transformation, driven by increasing guest expectations and changing models of service. The mission for CIOs and IT Heads is to design IT solutions for hotels that are secure, scalable, and smart. Fragmented legacy systems cannot handle the dynamic needs of global hotel operations.
Guests today want to experience a seamless, personalized stay, while the internal staff requires converged systems to deliver it. New-generation technologies are helping hotels re-model their IT infrastructure. Such solutions enable smooth operations, customize guest experiences, and offer the potential to scale and innovate at optimized cost.
Hotel brands are using emerging technologies to improve guest experience and foster innovation. Multicloud frameworks and AI solutions provide the backbone upon which contemporary hospitality is now operating.
IHG, with over 6,000 hotels across the world, has incorporated a complete multicloud infrastructure with AWS, GCP and Azure. It also absorbed AI solutions in the business, such as demand forecasting, chatbots and voice assistant systems. This ensured their operations are seamless in enhancing how they engage with guests. Consequently, it has provided them with the agility to innovate and offer enhanced experiences for both guests and hotel owners.
With over 9,000 properties, Wyndham Hotels & Resorts upgraded its technology by migrating the main reservation system to AWS. This ensured faster performance and better reliability in their systems. To enhance guest experience and streamline operations, the hotel incorporated several smart features, including:
These changes streamlined their operations and significantly improved guest satisfaction.
With evolving guest expectations and complexity of global operations, outdated IT systems have become a huge impediment. Modern hospitality needs agility, integration, and scalability that legacy systems can’t deliver.
In today’s fast-changing hospitality world, many hotels are still using old IT systems on siloed databases and physical servers. These legacy platforms might have worked fine back then but have become an impediment in the present day. Such systems hamper quick access to data, are incapable of easily being integrated with newer systems, and are costly to maintain. Also, traditional infrastructures can’t scale fast enough where guest expectations and global business needs are changing rapidly. Since these outdated systems aren’t built for modern operations, staff often face errors and guests experience inconsistent service. This affects loyalty and reviews. In simple words, legacy systems are holding hotels back.
Scaling a hotel chain globally is more than just expansion, it’s navigating a maze of regional complexities. Below are some of the operational and technology challenges hotel chains face across key regions-
In Europe, legacy systems struggle to keep up with strict privacy regulations like GDPR. Compliance isn’t optional, and outdated tech can’t always keep pace with the fine print.
In parts of the APAC region, even stable internet can’t be taken for granted. Here, legacy platforms often become liabilities, slowing down service where speed matters most.
Guests expect frictionless check-ins and real-time updates. But older systems block the path to mobile-first experiences, keeping service rooted in the past.
Not all properties within a hotel chain run on the same playbook. Brand tiers bring their own tech expectations and complications.
This results in inconsistent guest experiences and operational gaps dilute brand identity across the chain.
Scaling a hotel business, whether across cities or countries, requires systems that are flexible and adaptable. But legacy platforms weren’t built with that kind of growth in mind. For example, a hotel in North America may need powerful cloud systems to support many users simultaneously. On the contrary, a hotel in APAC region might need lighter systems that can work offline or with less internet. Legacy systems also stall the rollout of new services or updates across multiple locations. Each property may require different custom setups, making everything slower, more expensive, and harder to manage. This too affects innovation, preventing hotels from keeping up with constantly shifting guest needs.
The introduction of a robust IT infrastructure is key to overcoming operational and technological roadblocks across hotel chains. It enables consistency, compliance and better guest service as outlined below:
With the deployment of cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP), hotels beat expensive hardware investments to ramp up their operations. It provides services ranging from mobile check-in applications to chatbot support in one region and rolls out the same worldwide. If there’s an outage, cloud enables systems to fail over to a backup location automatically, improving reliability. Moving to the cloud brings down maintenance costs and enables quicker innovation. This happens because updates are pushed instantly instead of waiting weeks for provisioning of hardware.
With Docker and Kubernetes, hotels package their applications into small, portable units known as containers. In other words, applications such as a booking engine or a housekeeping tool will run reliably on any platform. Containers will also help hotel groups with multi-brands (luxury, midscale, economy) to maintain consistency throughout their properties. IT teams can roll out updates faster and much safer knowing that they’ll work the same everywhere. Hence, a few unexpected issues are raised, and new features are rolled out faster.
AI & Machine Learning are gradually changing the backstage operations of a hotel. Such systems learn through past bookings, guest preferences, and competitor pricing. A hotel can create personalized promotions and notify when an equipment is nearing maintenance. To answer guest queries instantly without any staff intervention, AI chatbots and voice assistants are used. This creates a personalized journey for the guests and works towards freeing up the staff for more productive tasks.
IoT devices like motion detectors and smart thermostats give hotels the chance to improve the guests’ comfort. For example, as per the guests’ preferences and occupancy rates, the temperature and lighting of a room is adjusted. This application of IoT in hospitality industry personalizes the experience as well as alerts staff of disruptions beforehand. It further strengthens the reliability of IT solutions for hotels.
Consolidated dashboards having data from reservation, CRM, and maintenance instead of logging in to different systems are now available to hotels. These dashboards provide real-time views across the functionalities of the hotel. The provision of all information-financial, operational, and guest-facing in one space creates a more efficient operation and better decisions more quickly.
The 24×7 managed cloud services that HSC runs its platforms on involve infrastructure provisioning, monitoring, incident management and performance tuning. This ensures the clients have consistent up-time status and operational visibility with their distributed deployments all while being compliant.
The HSC cloud security services cover all aspects including IAM, data encryption, vulnerability management, and threat detection using SIEM tools. Their Secure by Design approach includes integration of risk assessments, policy enforcement, and managed SOC to guarantee resilience against cyber threats.
HSC provides a full suite of IoT solutions from device integration, data processing from sensors, gateway development, to analytics platforms. With capabilities to develop IoT-edge devices and implement real-time monitoring systems, HSC powers smart hotel room They also support the application of various IoT protocols (MQTT, CoAP) and enable data ingestion into enterprise systems seamlessly.
HSC emphasizes the delivery of cloud-native services for developing cloud applications, microservices architecture, automation, and big-data processing. This enables HSC clients to build applications that scale across any environment-whether public, private, or hybrid cloud. HSC helps ensure fast time-to-market through DevOps pipelines, CI/CD frameworks, and cluster deployment in major cloud platforms.
HSC’s Docker creates lightweight portable application containers, while Kubernetes is responsible for orchestration, management, and other functions. This is aimed at benefits in scalability, auto-healing, and zero-downtime deployments. Their solutions optimize both cloud and on-premise environments along with GPU container support for compute-heavy workloads.
HSC offers AI/ML solutions in customer behavior analysis, predictive analytics, recommendation engines, and anomaly detection. They also build and deploy deep learning models for computer vision and NLP. Their solution offerings span from model training, testing, deployment, to integration with business systems. They also assess generative AI use cases that include content generation, document summarization, and translation of languages.
HSC unifies dashboards that aggregate operations and performance data from IT environments. AIOps detects issues using root-cause analysis and automated incident resolution. It features dashboards describing the infrastructure health, application metrics and performance indicators to allow timely decision-making.
HSC offers indoor positioning systems and location-based services via BLE, Wi-Fi, and sensor fusion. Their Wayfinder solution enables real-time indoor navigation and geofencing. This context-aware system makes use of analytics (dwell time, heat maps) and location-triggered automation in physical environments.
The SWAP platform built by HSC provides seamless Wi-Fi connectivity based on Passpoint (Hotspot 2.0) technology. It guarantees secure and encrypted one-time onboarding with WPA2/WPA3 support. Furthermore, SWAP provides location analytics coupled with user behavior insights and monetization opportunities through location-aware promotions and branded Wi-Fi engagement.
HSC’s management of the dynamic environment at sea gives it technical depth and operational maturity to deliver robust IT solutions for hotels.
As the hospitality IT landscape continues to evolve, IT leaders have the responsibility of providing real-time intelligence across every touchpoint. Legacy systems are not just technical hindrances but also roadblocks in terms of growth, personalization, and brand-building potential. Today’s success depends on connected infrastructures and IT solutions for hotels that can adapt to guest expectations and market shifts. Organizations already managing complex mobile environments offer real-world proof of what’s achievable. The way forward lies in creating partnerships with those technologies that drive innovation into the present and beyond.
