As the Hospitality Industry Technology Exposition & Conference (HITEC) fast approaches, industry talk is turning to technology. Last year HITEC drew more than 5,000 hospitality professionals and 300 exhibitors to Austin, TX. How many will arrive at the Anaheim (CA) Convention Center a week from today for this year’s version?

Ermis Sfakiyanudis, the president and CEO of eTelemetry, for one, will be there. He’s excited to see what’s new and to hear about the challenges everyone is facing as the industry struggles through these lean times. His company provides business information and intelligence from network activity and offers a product to the hotel industry that manages guest Internet access speeds and provides the option to market premium bandwidth tiers.

We chatted with Sfakiyanudis about HITEC and the bandwidth issues and opportunities in the lodging industry.

Are you looking forward to HTEC?

Yes, the cool thing about HITEC is seeing people talk about the challenges they’re having. We’re hoping to be a part of that conversation.

What do you hope to see?

We always want to see the innovation. We’re a tech company and I’m a gadget guy at heart, so I enjoy seeing solutions that don’t have anything to do with the problems we’re solving. I like seeing what competitors have popped up and any innovative approaches. For us the biggest thing is the feedback we get from actual users on the floor. That feedback is invaluable.

Has high-speed Internet access become an expected amenity at most hotels?

I think the answer is absolutely. The expectation is you’ll have some sort of access to high speed Internet just about anywhere you go when you travel. Not only the expectation, but also that it will be truly high speed because most people have blazing speeds at home.

And that’s the challenge for the industry, right?

Because everybody’s got good bandwidth at home, even standard sites have become far more media rich. Even just traditional sites like shopping sites and news sites that a couple years ago were primarily text based have now become very media rich. The residential connection has kept up and even enabled that; the hospitality sector has not kept up with the bandwidth to accommodate that. The biggest problem is streaming video. The expectation is high-speed Internet access will be provided and that it will be fast. That’s not always the case.

Is the expectation it will also be free?

It’s dependant on type of property. As a traveler, I’m actually surprised when it is a lot of times. It’s counter-intuitive, limited-service hotels tend to give it away for free, and they’re cheaper, and higher-end hotels tend to charge $9-12 a night for access.

Can different levels of service be offered to different rooms and guests?

Over the last couple of years vendors have taken a shot at this. When you travel and hook up your laptop, you usually connect to a network. What you generally see is some sort of branded welcome page and it says do you want to get on the Internet. The way a lot of vendors have tried to accommodate tiers is asking if you want to go slow for free and pay more for faster speeds. But what happens is people will get on for free and then it’s not fast enough to do what they need to do.

How does your product work?

One of the key differentiators is we give the opportunity to buy the premium tier right out of the gate and then we monitor how much bandwidth is being used by each guest, and when they hit the ceiling of that free tier, we’ll message into the browser and say, ‘Hey, you could be going faster if you were on a premium tier.’ And then give them the option to upgrade at that point.

Huh?

Are you a car guy? I liken it a high-speed corvette that I read about. It goes 200 (mph) out on the track, but it’s got a chip that limits the speed. It’s the same sort of thing on the Internet side. It’s artificially limited if you’re just using it for free, but if you hit that limit you can choose to hit that switch to go faster.

Doesn’t the economy make this more challenging for hoteliers right now?

It’s actually made it more relevant. Property owners are struggling on a couple fronts…fewer guest nights and then there’s pressure because room rates are so widely known through various sources. If you raise your prices, they’ll go next door. So any way to generate additional revenue without being an annoyance to guests draws a lot of interest.

Do you provide the Internet access?

No, we call it bolting on to an existing solution. We’re not replacing what they’ve already spent money on; we’re giving them an enhancement.

If people are paying additional charges for “high speed” Internet, hotels better be able to provide that, right?

What we tell property owners when we deploy is to upgrade their bandwidth now that they have a revenue stream to accommodate that…So that there are different levels of speed available for folks that have large file transfer demands, gamers, streaming video. We can build safeguards against that problem, so that we give a consistent guest experience. If surfing for free, it’s not a crawl, but slower than if you’re paying and the paid guys need to get as much as they’re paying for. You can have a limited number of premium slots available.

For more information on eTelemetry, check out www.etelemetry.com/products/notify.aspx.

For more information or to register for HITEC, go to www.hitec.org.