Best of hotel living at home

A memorable hotel experience stays around with you for some time. Perhaps it was the quirky décor (If you’ve stayed at QT Hotel in Sydney or Wellington, you are probably nodding your head), the breath-taking view from your room or the amazing breakfast.

The hotel people know that impressing their guests with new experiences is a great way to get repeat customers.

Have you ever thought about your experiences with technology while a hotel guest?

It seems that many of us are wanting to bring our best hotel tech experiences into our homes, and this may be a tip for sellers looking for a point of difference.

Consumers’ smart home expectations are reflecting vacation experiences, so going beyond the horizon pool with swim-up bar.

A hotel may be the first place you come across technology such as smart parking, occupancy sensor-controlled systems, predictive maintenance and high-tech bathrooms.

The other thing about the hotel people is that they are generally focused on finding ways to enhance the guest experience, but at the same time, not blow out the budget. They look for ways to control costs. Technology may deliver both, and while there is much you can’t bring home from your hotel experience, like the 24-hour concierge, you may be able to replicate the technology in your home.

Are you familiar with predictive maintenance? By formal explanation, it is a technique that uses conditionmonitoring tools and techniques to track the performance of equipment during normal operation to detect possible defects and fix them before they result in failure.

It can involve tools within the walls of the hotel bedroom or bathroom to alert staff of leaking pipes or electrical faults.

This smart-hotel technology trend is moving into the residential arena, with such maintenance tools integrated into homes being built.

Homeowners will be more familiar with occupancy sensor-controlled systems. Smart thermostats have built-in sensors that scan the space and the room constantly for motion and body heat and can raise or lower temperatures based on seasons and how many people there are in the room.

This and sensor-controlled lighting can help reduce energy usage and costs. It’s possible for lights to shut off when no one is in a particular room or in a particular space, and for power supply to the microwave or coffee machine to be shut down when no one is around.

If you’ve ever travelled in Japan, you may recall the toilets with great fondness. Smart toilets are found in most hotels and department store bathrooms. This high-tech toilet wizardry delivers climate-controlled seats, a touch of a button or wave of a hand to lift or lower the seat, a built-in bidet, warm air dryer, automatic deodorizer and flush, and it’s self-cleaning!

It’s an experience that is likely to find its way into the home. So too is smart parking. The use of technology to assign parking spots and streamline traffic in and out of a parking garage will become more prevalent in residential developments, with high-end home buys being the first to expect this.