Anyone at GBCblue’s Tidewater Cove office can watch live updates of the company’s daily earnings on a flat panel TV.
Every time a hotel guest swipes a credit card in a GBCblue computer, copier or fax, the screen changes. By noon on a recent Monday, transactions totaled $4,780.
Vancouver-based GBCblue, or Global Business Center Inc., develops software for hotels and also sells, installs, remotely manages and provides tech support for hotel business centers.
GBCblue purchases equipment en masse from companies such as Dell, MPC, Canon, Lexmark and Microsoft, and customizes it with software designed to hotels’ specifications.
The company was founded in 2003, and CEO Victor Alikin expects it to bring in more than $5 million in 2008.
Most of its clients are outside the local market, where Joe Adkisson, vice president of guest interface technology and key accounts, said there are more high-end hotels. The company works with a handful of Oregon clients including Portland Marriott, the Oregon Convention Center and Seattle’s Hotel Monaco. Luxury hotel chains Morgans Hotel Group and Omni use GBCblue exclusively.
There are about 300,000 traveler transactions on GBCblue’s machines each month at 300 sites in 40 states, Canada the Caribbean and England. About a third of those transactions are at pay-per-use stations.
The company claims zero cases of identity theft.
ORION: Shooting for the stars
GBCblue’s newest software development is ORION, the Online Room Interactive Ordering Network, that will pilot at the Omni Mandalay Hotel in Dallas this winter. The program is designed to allow hotel guests to use laptops and web phones to order room service, retrieve bags, request housekeeping and more.
In the future, ORION will work on guest room TVs, too.
Alikin said online room service is more effective than phone service because computer programs can be more effective at upselling due to the hotel industry’s high employee turnover and factors like mood, personality and language barriers.
“Clearly the average (room service bill) is higher on the computer,” said Alikin, who declined to provide statistics. “It’s a lot easier to program the system to upsell consistently.”
For example, if a guest orders a steak ORION will suggest a glass of red wine to go with it or a dessert to follow.
“You can predefine all your matches,” Alikin said.
That opens up possibilities for hotels to partner with food vendors, who could pay hotels and GBCblue a fee to have their products recommended in upselling.
Programs like ORION could also provide efficient means for hotels with 500 to 1,000 rooms to update guests on daily specials and events with text and digital photos.
Coming up is GBCblue’s “martini bar initiative” that would allow guests to pre-order drinks online and have them custom blended at their rooms.
“They come and mix it in front of you,” Alikin said. “It’s kind of a little show.”
A need for security
Outside guest rooms, corporate travelers are sharing hotel business centers more with the general public, leading to a greater need for security.
Travelers who use business centers often use them to check in for flights, print boarding passes, check e-mail and bank accounts or research a travel area.
Keystroke loggers are the greatest security threat at public computers, according to GBCblue. Cyber thieves can slip a small keystroke logger into a computer’s USB port to track any data typed on its keyboard, including bank account numbers, user names and passwords.
“They want your 401(k),” Adkisson said of hackers.
Likewise, if a user opens a document on a public computer and doesn’t save it, the file could still be accessed in a temporary documents folder. And while document recovery is helpful when a computer crashes, it can make files accessible to multiple users on a public computer.
“It’s a bonus for the personal user, but with the public it’s a bad thing,” said Ken York, GBCblue’s vice president of operations.
He discourages travelers from using public computers that have a backlog of files in My Documents or on the desktop, or a long history of visited web sites.
To protect their guests and their own liability, hotels are using products like GBCblue’s Client Manager 4.
It removes each user’s history at the end of a session and can detect foreign devices in USB ports to disable keystroke loggers.
“It keeps that system clean and refreshed and shreds all your data,” Alikin said.
The program also has filters to block web sites that are inappropriate for viewing in public places like a lobby.
“With top hotels, it’s all about service,” Alikin said. “You have to assume that we’re part of the hotel and we have to give equal or better service than that hotel.”
HOTELS DEMAND HIGH TECH
Customers are looking for choice and control
Consumer demand for technology is increasing in local hotels, and with that comes the challenge of balancing it with personal service.
“(Technology) can save money, but the real point is service and options,” said Gerry Link, general manager of the Vancouver Hilton. “The customers have spoken and they’re looking for choice and control.”
Guests at the local Hilton can use lobby kiosks, hotel room TVs, personal laptops, web phones or business center computers to check in or out, print airline boarding passes, order room service and make reservations at the Grey’s at the Park, located inside the hotel.
Its 24-hour business center has a laptop docking station, three pay-per-use computer stations and printer, fax and copier services. And members of Hilton’s frequent-stay benefits program can check in prior to arrival on personal web devices.
Hilton mandated nearly all of those services be available upon the hotel’s opening in 2005. The kiosks, a new Hilton requirement, were added in 2007.
The Hilton is just one area hotel making technology part of its guest experience.
Of 33 Vancouver-area hotels surveyed in an ongoing study by the Southwest Washington Convention and Visitors Bureau, 15 offer Wi-Fi, 26 offer high-speed internet and 12 have a business center. Seven offer all three services and seven don’t offer any.
But hotel guests still want service with a personal touch, Link said.
“We’re trying to keep up with the changing marketplace,” he said. “High service with high tech – we’re trying to match those two things.”
At the Vancouver site, which is also a convention center, lobby kiosk use is frequent but inconsistent.
“We prefer people come and talk to us,” Link said. “(Some) have had enough of technology and they’d like to talk to someone.”
That’s also the case at Vancouver’s Marriott Spring Hill Suites, where more than 70 percent of guests are corporate travelers – about 400 weekly, said General Manager Alison Hite.
Hite doesn’t expect to see fancy tech services rolled out too quickly in this area.
“I think it’s going to be a little harder in our market because I think people still want a friendly face,” she said.
Still, guest rooms at Spring Hill Suites have wireless internet access and flat panel TVs that connect to personal laptops and visitors’ home TiVo programs.
“(We’re) trying to stay ahead and sell to our clients the way they want us to sell to them,” Hite said.
Even Spring Hill Suites’ training has gone techie. New staffers learn the ropes on a Playstation video game unit with a Marriott-designed program. Employees do their rounds with checklists and reminders from the mobile Playstation during the four-hour training. The local hotel bought the Playstation for $350 through Marriott a year ago.
“It’s teaching the new hires the way they want to be taught,” Hite said. “You can get it in different languages so everyone can be involved.”
Both hotels offer online trip and meeting planners.
Ensuring all of the tech amenities work is the biggest challenge, Link said.
“Being consistent, having a product that’s available and affordable and that works, that’s the biggest thing,” he said. “The price only becomes an issue when the thing isn’t working correctly.”
Charity Thompson can be reached at cthompson@vbjusa.com.
