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Automated mini bars in hotel rooms
May 16, 2008
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Welcome to Business Ideas this week with me, Melanie Yip.
It’s been described as a hassle free mechanism which monitors the food and beverage inventory in the mini-bar of a hotel room.
It provides an efficient way of re-stocking drinks in the room’s mini-bar.
And it uses wi-fi-technology to track a guest’s consumption of items from the mini bar.
To tell us more about this innovative technology that’s being used in hotel rooms is Jan Strijker, Managing Director of Bar Tech Automatic Systems Asia Pacific.
He first touches on the necessity for technology like this in view of challenges in managing mini-bars in hotel rooms.
JS: Operations face issues like controls and high staff costs to run the mini bar. So what we are trying to do is improve the guest experience, but also improve the bottom line of hotels and save on costs – energy costs and staff costs etc.
Speaking of the staff costs involved in maintaining the mini-bar, not many people take notice of this. Could you explain to us the problems that many hotels experience now?
JS: The ratio of a mini bar operation is you need 1 mini bar attendant per 100 rooms to run the mini bar operations efficiently. We can improve that to 400 mini bars to 1 room attendant. The way we do that is we can now pin point which rooms have had mini bar consumptions, so mini bar attendants do not have to go to all the rooms to check the status of the mini bars. We can now do that online. For example, in the morning, the mini bar operations run a report which tells them exactly which rooms are due to check out and which of those rooms have had mini bar consumptions. And it is usually 50% of the rooms due to check out that have mini bar consumption. So you can imagine cutting down on your operational overheads.
So explain to us how this mini bar technology works?
JS: So basically, every mini bar is connected to a server. And that connection can be via cable or wireless. We have recently implemented the system at the Pan Pacific hotel in Singapore where all 800 mini bars are connected to the server via a wireless network. That server is in turn connected to the front office system. So when a guest checks in, the mini bar unlocks. When the mini bar unlocks, we also regulate the temperature because you can imagine when you have a manual mini bar, you have 800 mini bars in the hotel and they are equipped with mechanical thermostats. So irrespective of the status of the room, the mini bar will continue to produce coldness. What we can do is when a guest checks into a room, the mini bar temperature should be 4-5 degrees centigrade. But as soon as a guest checks out, we do not have to keep the temperature to 4-5 degrees; we can set the temperature of a mini bar in a vacant room to 10 degrees. What we are achieving is 50% in energy savings. The guest goes into a room, he/she experiences the same. Our mini bar looks like the traditional mini bar. The guest can remove an item, or he/she can look at an item and then put it back within a certain time period, like 30 seconds and nothing will be charged. But if he leaves it out of the mini bar for 30 seconds, it will be charged to his folio. And when the guest checks out the next morning, he mini bar charges appear on his bill and there are no questions asked like “did you consumer anything from the mini-bar?” So check out can be much faster than a traditional mini bar, the guest experiences improvement in service in that regard.
And how do you address the issue of guests checking into a room and removing items from the mini bar before placing their own items into the mini bar?
JS: Well, we have got two solutions for that. One is to provide a guest courtesy shelf. We will provide a small space in the mini-bar where guests can put their own medication or place products he/she bought in town. That is a normal plate which sits on top of the sensors. We have also developed a courtesy X which itself has sensors built in. It happens very often that when guests check out, he or she might forget something. For example, items like medication. We are now able to at the reception level, remotely check if the guests had left anything on the shelf and we can alert them to the fact that he or she left the medication on the fridge.
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