Hospitality Industry Comes Home to Mobile Technology

By MICHELLE MAN
Published: July 2009

With the SoMo 650, a hotel valet can check guests in immediately upon arrival.

As a result, restaurants, hotels, travel agencies, and other businesses in the hospitality arena are busy setting up mobile strategies and infrastructure. Everyone from Expedia to Ruth’s Chris Steak House is launching a mobile version of their website, and restaurants from L.A. to Boston to Dublin, Ireland have begun Twittering about menu updates and special offers. Hotels are offering device docking stations and electronic books, and this month, one of the resorts at Walt Disney World even released an iPhone app.

However, it’s not just the customers who are using mobile gadgetry. It’s also the hospitality workers, from management to wait staff to housekeeping, who are relying on mobile technology, as a way to increase productivity and improve customer service. Here at Socket Mobile, hospitality is one of the primary vertical markets that we target, and over the years, we have been involved in a variety of interesting deployments in hotels, casinos, restaurants, and other businesses in the hospitality arena.

Before Socket launched the SoMo 650® handheld computer in 2007, Socket hardware peripherals were already being utilized in a variety of PDA-based hospitality applications. In the early days of PDAs, when almost no devices came with Wi-Fi®, restaurants in the U.S. used Socket WLAN cards for wireless order-taking. In Thailand, a major restaurant chain deployed Socket magnetic stripe readers for reading customer rewards cards at tableside. In Germany, a large concert hall utilized a Socket Bluetooth® barcode scanner for scanning tickets and identifying VIP guests. At the same time, Socket also began partnering with a variety of software developers and solution providers who specialize in mobile hospitality applications.

A waitress processes a credit card payment directly at the customer's table.

After the SoMo 650 entered the market, it has become the device of choice at a number of eateries, including hotel and spa restaurants in Germany and Austria, bistros in France, and a cinema chain in Texas that serves food inside its theaters. The device is also slated for deployment at a major chain of fast food pizzerias in the U.K. Using the SoMo 650 helps restaurants provide speedier service, reduce order errors, increase upsells, and serve more tables per day.

Typically, restaurants that deploy the SoMo 650 already have a stationary POS (point of sale) system and want to upgrade to a mobile solution, or they already have a mobile system in place but want to replace the handheld computer. Restaurants favor the SoMo 650 because of its crisp display screen, compact size and expandability, which make it more practical for waiters to use than bulky, heavy industrial devices that have too many options built in.

Besides restaurants, the SoMo 650 is also being used at hotels. Hotels are cost-intensive businesses, and especially now with the tough economy, many hotels are strategically looking to mobile technology as a way to both trim backroom expenses and improve customer service. Most hotels that have implemented the SoMo 650 use it for POS, such as for taking drink orders around the swimming pool. One notable exception is a famous hotel and casino in Las Vegas, which has deployed dozens of the SoMo 650 for restocking minibars and billing for snacks and drinks in thousands of guest rooms everyday. Other casinos in the U.S. are using the SoMo 650 for reading customer rewards cards in card lounges and other gaming areas. Although POS will probably remain the most common hotel application for the SoMo 650, there are many new handheld applications emerging in the hotel IT market that are also ideal for the device, such as unlocking doors, configuring card keys with a smart card reader/writer, managing housekeeping orders, registering guests, and concierge services such as booking taxis or entertainment.

Restaurants and hotels aside, other businesses in the hospitality industry that have deployed Socket products include:

• A world-famous theme park in the U.S. uses the CompactFlash Scan Card with a tablet computer to conduct customer surveys at the park entrance. It is also testing Socket magnetic stripe readers for reducing long lines at kiosks.
• A zoo in the U.K. employs a Socket Bluetooth barcode scanner to read membership cards and booking forms.
• A major cruise company based in the U.S. uses the SoMo 650 to track passengers during emergencies.
• Several golf courses in Las Vegas utilize the SoMo 650 for POS at outdoor beverage carts.
• A company that plans events for Fortune 500 companies uses hundreds of Socket magnetic stripe readers to track attendance.

For customers that prefer to deploy a device larger than the SoMo 650, Socket has partnered with Fujitsu and TabletKiosk to create tablet-based hospitality solutions that integrate a Socket hardware peripheral.

The mobile technology market for the hospitality industry is not even close to being saturated yet. As restaurants, hotels, and other businesses in the hospitality arena gear up for mobile customers, a lot of them will be open to investigating new mobile strategies in workplace operations too. This year, a large number of businesses will also be looking to upgrade or replace their POS system in order to comply with PCI security standards, and in the process, many will explore the benefits of pairing Wi-Fi networks with handheld devices, smart cards, VoIP, RFID, and barcode scanning technology.

Socket expects to see more business in the hospitality arena in the next several years and is aggressively pursuing opportunities in the space. Currently, Socket has more than 20 partners around the world who specialize in mobile hospitality solutions, and with our SoMo 650, and our complete line of mobile hardware peripherals, we aim to be a leading supplier of business mobility solutions for the hospitality industry.