Hospitality in 2035 (English)

The year is 2035. After a long journey, you open the door of the hotel room and the mood lamps that turn orange and yellow automatically switch on — perfectly adapted to your mood at that moment. Jazz plays through the speakers and the temperature is also exactly the way you like it. You put the suitcase in the corner and dive into bed: you feel a hard mattress — wonderful. The hotel does not know you personally and you did not provide any additional information when booking. Yet everything is perfectly tailored to your preferences. How is this possible?

As a partner in comfort, we are continuously working on innovation. This article outlines a glimpse into the future and tries to create a scenario in the hospitality of later that inspires thinking.

In an emotion-driven market such as the hospitality industry, (big) data is becoming more important than ever, according to research by HN. The more data a hotel, restaurant or B&B collects, the more personal the experience becomes for a guest. After all, you get to know each guest (each with his or her own preferences) better, which you can respond to with personal service. Today, you see these practices reflected in parties such as Google Maps, which develops algorithms that recommend restaurants that match your preferences, and Booking.com suggests hotels where you would like to sleep.

These preferences are generated based on, for example, the hotels, restaurants or B&Bs you have been to before, the searches you have conducted and demographic data such as age, gender, profession and religion. That process, from given to preference, is performed by an algorithm: an instruction, a piece of code, to solve a problem. In this case, the problem is, “Where shall I have dinner tonight or where shall I spend the night?”

The algorithm solves this question using a whole bunch of data and makes suggestions based on that — yet they’re often just estimates of what ‘’you might like’’. And these estimates are getting more accurate every year.
In 2035, these “estimates” will simply become “facts.” How?

There will be a shift from big data as we know it today to big data with genetic data. That is data that provides information about a person’s health, physiology, psychology and other personal data that cannot be created by computers.

Instead of suggesting that you might rather eat fish than meat tonight, this is becoming a fact. Your genetic data tells the algorithm that you want to eat fish. This also applies to other emotional matters, such as music preference, the mood you are in, prefer sweet or salty, hard or soft, warm or cold and much more.

Your smartphone automatically measures this and passes this on to parties such as Google, Booking.com, TripAdvisor or TheFork.

A completely personalized experience based on genetic data. Cool or a little scary? Let us know how you look at this in the comments!