On Monday 29 January, the Blue Mountains Hotel School was pleased to have Mr Ted Horner as a guest lecturer on campus to address students about the emerging trends in technology in guest rooms in hotels. Mr Horner’s presentation “The Hotel Room of the Future” argued for the centrality of the guest room to guest satisfaction and focused on the current and emerging technologies that guests demand: digital entertainment choices, wired/wireless broadband access, interactive services, digital/HDTV television, and the ability to plug in their own devices to the room’s TV and sound systems.
He emphasized the need for a comprehensive strategy and the challenge for hotels of creating a real ROI to keep pace with consumer demand, getting the cable infrastructure right from the outset, ensuring triple play (voice, data and digital video on demand) over a single converged network, full integration of all devices in the room; and creating a plug and play environment for guest to easily download their own content.
Mr Horner is a high-profile industry figure with 28 years’ experience in the hospitality industry and 20 of those in the computer industry. In 2004 he was the first non-American to be inducted to the HFTP Technology Hall of Fame in Dallas, Texas. In June 2002 he was a founding member of Hotel Technology Next-Generation (HTNG), an industry organization to facilitate next-generation, customer-centric technologies, and in 1994 founded The Hospitality Information Technology Association, a group of hospitality educators, hotel industry practitioners and IT vendors. In 1995 he launched HTR, the hospitality industry’s first technology newsletter.
