From Smart Rooms to Smart Hotels
This paper gives an overview of a potential path that new hotels have to satisfy to improve their status from a hotel with smart rooms towards a full scale smart hotel facility. It presents a possible transitional way including innovative applications based on modern information technology for ambient settings in the domain of hotel industry that aims to improve the quality of offered services towards clients, starting from the present level of smart rooms. The main objective is to pose the basis that hotels must satisfy by utilizing sophisticated information technologies for direct interaction with the guest, as well as to accommodate hotel services depending on guest's wishes and needs in order to make their stay as pleasant as possible. Accordingly, the paper concludes that the desired future of the hotel industry is within the concept of being a smart establishment aiming to leverage the disadvantages of being away from home and offering a unique guest experience.