How Apple Watch threatens hoteliers

I don’t know if it is very cool or rather scary, the imminent smart-watch fad. A few companies have been skirting around the edges of the pool trying to work out if consumers actually want to wear a watch that monitors their heartbeat, but now Apple, that technological monolith, has thrown its full weight behind the concept.

Why, you might ask, am I writing about the latest technology releases in a blog for the hotel industry? Put simply, it’s because Accor has already announced a specially designed smart-watch app which will be available to guests and customers should they choose to purchase the Apple Watch. The app, which will be released by the end of April, will allow users to receive alerts about online check-in status, access information about their bookings, receive information about their hotel’s services, access an interactive map and access their loyalty card details.

It’s not a stretch to imagine that the watch’s vibrating insides could be deployed to wake guests up if they’ve overslept on check-out day, or a notification pops up to tell what is available in the restaurant that evening. This is why I say it is either very cool or a frightning, Big Brother style intrusion (and I mean that in the George Orwell, not the Channel 4, sense).

The implications of a firm like Accor jumping aboard so quickly are wide reaching. No sooner have independent hoteliers begun to face the certainty that WiFi will eventually have to be free to guests (a rising tide perpetuated by the Premier Inn’s policy of rolling it out to the entire portfolio), but elsewhere in the world of chain hotels, communicating with guests will be intimate like never before. You can be sure that if Apple Watch wins the heart of the consumer, the other major hotel chains will join the app-producing game.

All of this adds yet more pressure on the independent to be creative with marketing, to be more attentive to customer feedback, and ultimately to generate an extraordinary level of loyalty. If Accor has your customer’s wrist, so to speak, then the battle for repeat business becomes yet tougher.

It remains hard to predict whether consumer will go for the watch at all, but one cannot easily dismiss the possibility. I will never forget that a friend of mine once made a call on tablet computers, saying the iPad was “a flash in the pan” and would be gone before the following Christmas. Alan Sugar said the same of the iPod some years previously (“Next Christmas the iPod will be dead, finished, gone, kaput”), and we all know how that ended up.