Then there’s Asheville, N.C.’s Kimpton Hotel Arras, which is rewiring old technology—elevators—to whisk guests directly to their floor without stopping to pick up others along the way.
Menus Go Digital
Restaurants account for roughly 25% of a hotel’s total revenue, according to real estate investment firm CBRE. To operate dining rooms safely, many properties are turning to reduced capacities: At the Inn at Little Washington, outside the nation’s capital, every other table at the three-Michelin-starred restaurant is populated by mannequins.
But for a majority of hotels and travelers, dining will boil down to a new form of room service in which food carts are left outside guest rooms and retrieved by the customers, rather than being brought inside and unveiled by staff. At Nayara, a resort in Costa Rica’s Arenal Volcano National Park, the golf carts used for room service deliveries are fully sanitized before each contact-less dropoff.
Others are going further in the need to eliminate as many touch points as possible when serving food. Before Covid-19, the Peninsula Hotels led the way with digital in-room systems that let you control your room’s temperature, lights, or order slices of cheesecake at 2 a.m. with the tap of an iPad button. Now the company is moving those services onto guests’ phones with PenChat, a 24/7 e-concierge service accessible via WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and WeChat.
At Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts, the pandemic has sped up projects already in the works. Its new Four Seasons App, now available across the 116 hotels, recently debuted with text-based conversations with staffers (not bots) in more than 100 languages. It also puts any piece of information normally printed on paper—spa services, local activities, menus, and more—into guests’ palms, digitally.
At Marriott, menus have been made available in the Bonvoy app at 230 of the company’s 7,300 hotels across 30 hotel brands—Ritz-Carlton, St. Regis, Editions, and W Hotels among them. According to John Wolf, the company’s vice president of global communications, Marriott is also following guidelines from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization by deploying hospital-grade disinfectants for high-touch surface areas (including TV remotes, door handles, and bathroom surfaces), placing disinfecting wipes in guest rooms, and providing personal protection equipment (PPE) at every level. The timeline for all this, Wolf says, is “over the next few months.”
For independent hotels, QR Codes are an easy alternative to developing an app: At the Wauwinet resort in Nantucket, Mass., guests can use them to pull up the menu and order from Topper’s, the on-site seafood restaurant.
The Need for “Normal”
While some travelers have adopted a wait-and-see philosophy before booking post-pandemic trips, others are sufficiently drawn by the promise of new technology and stricter protocols.
Checking into Aspen, Colo.’s the Little Nell on opening day—June 12—is Miami-based entrepreneur Eduardo Gaz. “After almost three months of no personal interactions and mainly staying home, I am craving some new surroundings, new smells, new sights,” he says. Not that the Colorado mainstay is all that new to him: His company, TTW Group, mainly plans ski trips for Brazilians. “I am confident that the Nell is reopening because they judged it to be safe,” he adds.
Ireland’s Dromoland Castle also has loyalists ready to return. The retreat reopens on July 3rd with socially distanced dining and PPE for both staff and guests, which has longtime guests such as Payne plotting a jaunt there later this summer. “The castle recently emailed us with their updated safety protocols, and we suddenly felt like it would be OK to book a trip,” Payne says.