The hotelier members of Hotel Technology Next Generation (HTNG) awarded the 2010 Most Innovative Hospitality Award to Intelity’s “ICE Touch on iPads” at the association’s Members’ Meeting last week. Applications focusing on guest mobility were valued highly this year. In addition to ICE Touch on iPads, members voted the MobileAccessVE product from Corning MobileAccess, and Allegro Mobile-Web-Kiosk Check-in/Out Solution from Ariane Systems, as runners-up. HTNG senior officers presented the awards at the 7th Annual Members’ Meeting of HTNG in San Diego, California on March 3.

 

Hotel members selected the winners by voting for their choice of the 17 different technology entrants whose products covered a wide range of hospitality technologies and systems, including entertainment systems and devices, guest services tools, property management systems, room controls, and booking systems.

 

The winning technology, ICE (Interactive Customer Experience) Touch on iPads, presents the hotel guest with the full array of hotel services (thirty or more depending on the hotel). An iPad is assigned to each guestroom where it is mounted on special stands or cases. With the touch of their finger, guests can order in-room dining, turn downs and wake-ups, request restaurant reservations, book transportation, make housekeeping requests and other services. In 2010, following the introduction of the iPad tablet, Intelity developed a guest interface that was deployed in September at the Royalton Hotel in New York City. Since then, it has been deployed at New York’s Plaza Hotel. Others, including the Hilton Inn at Penn in Philadelphia, will be premiering soon. This is Intelity’s second year on the award stand:  last year, their ICE software product was runner-up.

 

This year’s first runner-up technology, from Corning MobileAccess, focuses on personalizing the guest experience by providing guests with high quality access to their mobile content and services such as streaming video and gaming.  The MobileAccessVE architecture enhances hotels’ cellular coverage by leveraging existing LAN cabling for cellular signal distribution while maintaining full Ethernet and wireless LAN capabilities. MobileAccessVE allows hotels to address 2G/3G as well as 4G services. With this technology, hotels have a cost effective, quickly deployable, non-disruptive path to migrate to premium LTE service, with smart MIMO antenna technology, and the ability to support migration to enterprise femtocell solutions as guest bandwidth demands increase.

 

Allegro Online-Mobile-Kiosk Check-in/out Solution from Ariane Systems was the second runner-up this year. Allegro’s self-service technology allows guests to check in/out, pay, and manage their reservation from any web-enabled device, including cell phone, PC, laptop, PDA, iPad or even the lobby kiosk. Leveraging the power of a fully-featured “cloud-based” platform, Allegro automatically detects the device used during check-in and sends notifications and instructions to the guest via “push mode.” Through integration with OpenWays mobile key technology, it is possible to bypass the traditional “front desk” completely, as guests can use their mobile phone as a securely encrypted room key.

 

The voting this year resulted in the top three technologies being significantly ahead of the other contenders but, for the second year in a row, hotelier voting resulted in a tie for runner-up positions. HTNG applied the contest’s tie-breaker policy which applies the votes of industry consultants. Their vote put the Corning MobileAccess product into the first runner-up spot over Ariane Systems.

 

The other entrants for the award also included these products (in alphabetic order, by vendor name):