Beyond Pictures: Reimagining Hotel Booking with Digital Twins - MetaVisions #26

Last week, I booked a last-minute long-weekend holiday. I won’t say where to, but there won’t be much sleeping! After scrutinizing dozens of deals and hotels, I realized two things: I’m quite indecisive about holiday bookings, and relying on pictures to decide where to stay is outdated.
Being involved in Spatial Computing for a while, combined with a weird fascination on how technology can impact industries, gets me to look at customer experiences and business processes with a critical and creative viewpoint.

Beyond Pictures: Reimagining Hotel Booking with Digital Twins

Typically, we rely on two types of pictures:

• Owner-uploaded images: Often taken with wide-angle lenses and filters to enhance appeal.

• Visitor-uploaded photos: Usually poorly angled and often feature random distractions.

This is where a digital twin would shine. Imagine visiting a high-fidelity virtual version of the hotel you want to stay at. Being able to explore the hotel before even being there, visualizing how big the rooms are, experiencing the different layouts, all the amenities, and even how close to the beach it is. This could be done through modelling a 3D virtual version of the hotel or another more cost-efficient option could be using a photo-realistic solution. If done correctly, users would be able to walk around with an accurate sense of measure of environments either through an avatar (mobile, laptop) or more immersive with a VR headset.

If a full-on digital twin sounds too intense to start off with, I would even encourage 360 walkthrough recordings of the hotel.

A pretty staple feature of hotels, BnBs, and cruise ships is that rooms will be standardized and follow a strict layout. Of course, within the establishment, there will be a range of standardized room options, from a single room to the presidential apartment deluxe suite (I love how they inflate those names). Following this approach has positives such as:

• Easier to buy and manage items for the rooms

• Cleaning staff can be trained quickly and cleaning routines become increasingly faster

• One of the room options will almost always suit the customer

• Maintenance is easier and cheaper

However, being able to give customers a certain degree of customization for their room experience could do two things:

• Cater to customers that don’t fit into one of the pre-existing room options

• Create differentiation and innovation

Current hotel room options often lack flexibility for travelers. A significant portion of travelers, like families or large groups, struggle to find suitable accommodations. They might find a hotel that perfectly fits their location and amenity needs, but the room options force them to settle for separate rooms. What if they could create the perfect room for their group?

How would this be done?
Well, I don’t want to sound repetitive but Digital Twins. This could be quite simple to do:

• Create a 3D model of each room and put it into a ‘configurator’ format where users can see changes happening in the room as they select different options or drag items around.

• Prices could be calculated ‘per change request’ or ‘per bed added’, or a combination of those.

• Once the user is happy, they can go ahead and book.

• Of course, the hotel would need to review and confirm if the requested changes are authorized.

This digital twin 'configurator’ experience is already taking shape in other industries. For example, Nvidia’s Omniverse is being used to build high-fidelity configurators in the automobile industry. Some experiences are leveraging XR devices like the Apple Vision Pro to allow customers to see models on a 1:1 scale. https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/omniverse-apple-vision-pro/

Whilst I believe this could greatly enhance the customer experience and certainly help create brand loyalty as this would be a great differentiator, it would be impractical to do this for every customer and room. This is why reserving the configurator for large groups and families, who tend to spend more money, could be a good idea to introduce this product.

For my fellow travellers out there, would you agree that we need to innovate and improve the customer experience in the hospitality space?

See you soon,
Davi, MetaVisions

Any comments, questions or just a chat, feel free to reach out to me on:
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