The results from the FutureHotel research will be put into practice for the first time ever in a new hotel in Vienna.
The prestigious Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering and Organization IAO has chosen hetras to be a key technology partner for the “FutureHotel” project. This project, which covers all issues relating to the hotel of the future, will now take the next step in turning theory into practice with a new hotel that will serve as a “test bed”.
Expected to open in late 2014, the Hotel Schani Wien will not only make trend-setting technologies a reality, it will also serve as an environment to test the latest innovations. The objective is to find out what today‘s hotel guests really expect from their hotel stay: from reservation, to check-in and check-out, and on to the hotel lobby and the guest room. Based on the insights gained, incremental improvements relating to customer satisfaction will be incorporated into running hotel operations.
The Fraunhofer IAO initiated the “FutureHotel” project in 2008 and initially created a trend-setting hotel room, the Showcase FutureHotel in Duisburg. Since 2012, an additional laboratory called Urban Living Lab has opened in Stuttgart in the “Center for Virtual Engineering ZVE”. A fascinating prototype hotel lobby and hotel room have been developed here since the start of the project. More than 9,000 visitors have come to the Center for Virtual Engineering ZVE since it opened in June of 2012.
The next phase of the project will now involve the field of hotel technology. After extensive analysis of the systems on the market, Fraunhofer IAO and Hotel Schani Wien have selected hetras. Two of the decisive factors behind this decision were the fact that the solution is based on real cloud technology and, at the same time, it provides an open platform with which other innovative partners can be integrated quickly and easily.
Dipl.-Ing. (Arch.) Vanessa Borkmann, responsible for the project at Fraunhofer IAO, explains this decision: “Of all of the software providers we analyzed, hetras‘ approach clearly won us over. hetras has designed and implemented a solution for trend-setting hoteliers. As a result, the company is one of the pioneers in the field of hotel technology. hetras may be a relatively new company, but the hetras product is already running with success in the complex environments of many sophisticated hotels and hotel chains.”
Ulrich Pillau, Managing Director of hetras, adds: “We are extremely pleased to have been selected by Fraunhofer IAO und Hotel Schani Wien over all of the established and major technology companies in the hotel sector. More importantly, however, we view Fraunhofer IAO with the “FutureHotel“ project as the ideal partner for our quest: to be the choice for all new generation hoteliers. hetras founders and architects built the product with a clean, web-service architecture. This allows the ultimate in flexibility when integrating with third-party products. Not only can third party products interact directly with the underlying technology, but even entire pieces of the user interface can be swapped in and out, thus creating unprecedented customization.“
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