How Intelligent Video Surveillance Boosts Bottom Lines for Hotel Groups

AI-Based Analytics for Tackling Business Goals

Enhancing visitor satisfaction, increasing revenue, improving efficiencies, and reducing costs are key to driving hotel group success. One way to achieve those goals? Leveraging video surveillance with deep learning and artificial intelligence to deliver business insights and trends. Doing so can help ensure safety, prevent crowding, understand customer and visitor demographics, and optimize facility space. Furthermore, AI-based analytics platforms can help hotel group management analyze traffic and demographic patterns, respond in real-time to evolving situations, and accelerate video search. Tackling these key goals with video analytics will result in higher guest satisfaction, ultimately boosting bottom lines for hotel groups.

Join us as and look at 3 key areas where video analytics can make an impact on hotel group bottom line.

1. Manage Queues, Crowds, and Occupancy Compliance

Because guest services and experience have become so important to travers, eliminating or alleviating unsatisfactory guest experiences is one way business development managers can improve the guest service metric across their hotel group. What is one of the worst things you encounter on your well-deserved vacation? Long lines and crowds.

Real-time alerting can help managers deploy more staff to the front desk to assist with check-ins when crowds increase by detecting and alerting upon the number of people in a pre-defined area. Once the threshold is surpassed, pre-configured, rule-based alerts trigger, driving proactive response to efficiently address the congestion. Video analytics can also provide historical data and trends to help hotel managers strategically build intelligent staff schedules. Some video analytics solutions allow this data to be examined across multiple sites as well, which empowers hotel group management with business intelligence that uncovers why certain hotels in their chain are busier than others during the same time period.

2. Gather Traffic and Demographic Data 

In our data-driven world, hotel groups need accurate information about who they are based on the people they serve. Does the hotel serve a higher percentage of men or women? Adults or children? When do traffic peaks and valleys occur? How many guests are visiting the hotel, and are they repeat or rewards program visitors? When paired with intelligent video analytics, video surveillance can give date-backed answers to these questions. For instance, by tracking the number and type of objects in each location and aggregating that information, managers can analyze reports and more effectively plan marketing, merchandising, staff scheduling, deployment, and signage that are tailored to their guests’ needs.

Demographic data is particularly useful for hotel groups needing to stock amenities across various locations, as the concrete insights can drive targeted marketing and strategic merchandise and sundries purchasing. Additionally, at both a local and cross-chain level, this information can help managers schedule and deploy staff to better serve customers during times of peak traffic or know when to schedule routine maintenance to not disturb guests.

3. Improve Building Layout and Use Space More Effectively 

Video analytics software can also provide hotel groups with data to inform their decisions regarding space utilization and tenant leasing conditions. Quantitative, actionable intelligence delivered via dashboard reports and heatmaps give concrete data about object interactions, dwell time, and entrance/exit traffic and answer questions regarding which pathways in a hotel are most or least commonly used, which spaces are most popular, and which ones are underutilized?

Furthermore, analysis of one hotel’s video analytics could have implications across the entire group. Through aggregated video analysis of heatmaps and dwell time, managers could discover an underutilized yet high traffic area of the resort. Perhaps that information influences their decision to open a new venue stream, like a coffee shop. An additional guest offering like this likely increases guest satisfaction and hotel revenue, and the data could be used to justify replication at other hotels and resort locations within the hotel group.

A Cross-Business Intelligence Powerhouse

Video surveillance and analytic software are a powerhouse of business intelligence that hotel groups need to stay competitive in the industry. While video analytics solutions seem like a logical single-site solution, when deployed and leveraged properly across a hotel group, the benefits can be felt across the business. From managing crowds, to improving space utilization and gathering demographic data, video analytics is increasing guest satisfaction, securing repeat customers, and therefore increasing the hotel’s bottom line.

Interested in learning more about video analytics for your multi-site organization?

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in January 2022, and has been refreshed and updated for accuracy.