Promising a good nights sleep: the digitally infused hotel - Designing delivery

1. Promising a Good Night’s
Sleep: The Digitally Infused
HotelJose Luis Carretero

2. Intro
Hotels make an ideal case for illustrating the application of promise theory to real-world
businesses.
They are about people and architecture, but nowadays hotels are becoming digitally
infused because you can manage everything via internet, from the ability to search a
hotel, pick a room, to be able to check-out from there.

3. Promising Rest
The chain of promises, like the customer journey, begins before someone actually becomes a customer.
The hotels reservation site make a series of promises for the customer to take note before booking it,
these are usually a reference to the hotels usability, functionality and operation.

4. Promising the Transition to Rest
Once you have successfully booked a room, you make your way to the hotel lobby and find an agent to
check-in.
From this point the agent’s fundamental promise is to be friendly, helpful, and autonomous, to help you
get settled and to ease your transition from your travel and stress to rest and relaxation.

5. Promising to Help Employees
The check-in system has a promise with the lobby agent to help ease the process of setting up a new
customer in a room, thus allowing the agent to focus on client satisfaction rather than a mundane task
that is already automatized.

6. Promising Service Integration
Services promise to work together to facilitate the needs of the customers. Specifically when as part of
the trip, the guest may need the help of transportation services such as taxis or other airlines to get
around.

7. Keeping and Repairing Promises
The tricky part about promises is keeping them. Even with contingencies, nothing is perfect and in one
point or another the service might fail. That is why it should be determined how its best to repair broken
promises. Such as offering the customer a free drink if the check-in service is offline.

8. Keeping and Repairing Functionality Promises
IT systems also promise functionality, which needs a strategy to keep up the promise. Said strategy is
Continuous Integration, where the development team promises to deliver code that doesn’t break
features and running automated regression tests on a regular basis helps keep that promise.

9. Keeping and Repairing Operability Promises
IT organizations go to great lengths to keep their operability promises.
Fault tolerance strives to keep failures invisible to human operators.
But even with all the backups, replication, failover, built-in redundancy and all the other strategies built
to keep the service running no matter what, it is bound to fail.
That is why monitoring is a promise keeping strategy but it is not perfect.

10. Summary
Keeping promises is hard, imperfect and sometimes even the most reliable services are going to fail. That
is why fixing broken system promises and communicating skillfully about them is necessary.
At the end of the day in the industry of Hotels, customers have the final say in everything and if
something is not working they will most likely not be satisfied no matter how many promises you had.
This is why the more pervasive digital infusion becomes, the more likely it’ll be that consumers
understand the inevitability of failure.