Unlike Wi-Fi, TV on demand has the promise of driving ancillary revenues.

Humanity has certain basic requirements to survive and, it is hoped, thrive. The United Nations has views on this.

Hotel guests take a similarly rigid stance on what they expect out of a hotel stay and this has barely evolved since properties decided that the local stable counted as decent overflow accommodation.

A comfortable bed, a shower and a lockable door is the baseline we all expect in return for our money, across the segments. The shower may be shared but should still be accessible. Even hotels in the higher echelons don’t offer food as a matter of course with the basic room rate, something where they may face strong debate with the UN.

After many happy centuries of our paid-for home-from-home, guests’ basic needs have evolved. The battle for free (and decent) Wi-Fi has spilled over from angry conference debates into angry finger jabbing at hotel reception desks. Hotels felt that, after spending out on expensive networks – often signing themselves into costly agreements for decades – they had the right to charge guests to recoup the cost.

Guests did not share this opinion. Hotels were determined to continue to see Wi-Fi as an object of value and it was used as a lure to build loyalty program membership. The battle then moved to premium Wi-Fi access.

Guests continued to insist that Wi-Fi was a basic requirement of a stay and that, as such, they shouldn’t be paying for it. It was, went the rallying cry, like water. ‘But you pay for Wi-Fi in your houses!’ went the response. ‘And for water!’ Guests were unmoved.

But before hotels could come up with a way to charge for tap water, the battle was lost. Surveys reported that guests would not stay in a hotel which didn’t offer free Wi-Fi and that was that. Even Airbnb made a point of highlighting which properties had exemplary Wi-Fi. One study found that guests favored Wi-Fi over hot water.

Hotels now have to, well, suck the cost of Wi-Fi up. They can no more charge for it than they can charge for heating, cooling or use of carpet. It has become a basic amenity.

Hotels were hoping that was it for the next few centuries, but guests have evolved away from being happy with what they are given and have become more demanding. Part of this is good old consumerism, allowing us to fill our homes with the latest technologies and comforts in a way we just couldn’t before the good old days of the 1950s. When staying away from home we expect the same if not better.

This means that hotels face a new basic amenity in the form of content, a mere few years after swallowing the cost of Wi-Fi. Being able to access your Netflix/Disney+/insert myriad other platforms on the hotel TV is rapidly becoming this season’s must have. TV on demand is the newest guest demand.

Is casting the new water? Rapid adoption across the sector suggests that it is, but before the bottom line starts to take the strain, hotels can console themselves that this need not be a repeat of the water/Wi-Fi debate.

Choosing a casting product which offers a fully-interactive – and brandable – TV platform means that hotels can promote additional services and facilities which can be used to build a relationship with the guest, but also drive ancillary revenues.

A guest which is sitting happily in their room is a guest which is more likely to order room service than stray away from the property and buy their dinner outside the compound. They are also more likely to order more, away from the judgmental voice of the receptionist taking an order for extra chips.

One of the restricting factors for Wi-Fi were those costly contracts, made all the most traumatic because of the banks of computers and routers required to keep networks upright. The cloud means that all of this can be now achieved offsite, so hotels need no longer have a mysterious room full of winking and humming equipment which no one in the building can fix when it goes wrong. And when it does? Issues can quickly be resolved remotely.

All of this leads to an improved guest experience, increasing the chances of that most-wanted of all hotel results: true and lifelong loyalty. It also leads to higher ratings from hotel guests, ratings which will translate directly into higher room rates.

Adding casting need not mean adding cost. At the least, it should be cost neutral. At best, revenue generating.

So, give your guests what they want: turn that water into wine.

Kevin Edwards, CCO, Nevaya says that the time for dithering is past: you’re no one if you’re not in the cloud.

“It is time to move on from the debate about whether to be in the cloud and talk about something else. No-one who is really serious about streamlining their operations, about delivering exceptional service, about making a profit, should still have a room full of technology they need to maintain.

“If you have one of these awful rooms – and we have all seen them in hotels – then you need a team to fix it when it goes wrong, and it will go wrong. That means a team which specialises in the technology you have, always on call, always ready to act, whether they are needed or not, remembering that there will be times when everything is working as they should, so these people will be, what? Helping out at reception?

“We don’t have teams to spare at the moment in hospitality and certainly no money to maintain such an expert one. There needs to be a shift in mentality, because all you’re doing really is storing up costs of people that are maintaining equipment.

“I use the analogy of security in IT systems. Look at the government, how they are constantly suffering data breaches. That’s because they’re not information security experts, that’s not what they do. Whereas you go to somebody like Google, they’ve got a team the size of every government in the world combined specialising in security. Cloud services remove the need for the depth of knowledge, you acquire a service that is managed and maintained by experts with the depth of skills to support what is required, what is more, it has infinite scalability.

“It’s about giving yourself access to the right resources, as opposed to trying to be an expert in infrastructure, applications, security. You can’t expect one person to understand all of the different disciplines, but the cloud means it’s out there and it’s available.

“And once you get rid of that room, it changes the billing model. Having everything off site means that you go from a large capital expense to an operational cost. You are acquiring a service, rather than spending huge amounts of capital on IT projects.

“For us, we not only want all equipment out of those backrooms, we want it out of the guest rooms as well. And the reason for this is that we want the operational teams to focus on delivering operations and not having to go into the guest room. The dongles in rooms have, historically, created the most issues around casting and in our new platform the cloud cuts these out, as well as increasing scalability, making it unlimited. This means that as a group, you can continue to grow and you can deliver the same consistent service across your estate.

“And when it’s done well, you can even reduce your on-premise staff down to none. Brands like Numa have perfected it so that all you have is one security person. You take care of the check in, you’re already connected to the wifi, you can get into your room. What else do you really want? It’s meeting a guest need and an investor need. Every cloud really does have a silver lining.”

Ben Clifford, co-founder and CTO, Nevaya, looks back over his journey to embracing the one true cloud.

‘I was born in a hotel, my grandparents started a hotel in 1960 after putting people up on their farm during the Bath & West show, the Airbnb story. I started helping out as a child, recycling the bottles from being the bar when I was 10, “which clearly wasn’t going to pay as well as a role in tech”, before getting into tech. From around 13 I was working on the PMS and PoS systems and when I was 16 my grandparents bought me a computer in return for running their IT system.

‘When I went to university I wrote an Expedia-type OTA before Expedia as my university dissertation and James [Richmond, Nevaya co-founder & CEO] and I got 60 or 70 properties on it.

‘At that time guests were starting to demand wifi in their rooms and we thought this looked a likely market. We didn’t realise that people were buying in solutions from Cisco, I just wrote one in my bedroom. We built the hardware, we installed it, then we looked after the whole system, almost by accident.

‘It wasn’t until 2008 that a company called Exterity asked us to come up with a way to sell their TV solution over IP. By this point the WiFi network had grown to be the biggest network in the hotel because people wanted it everywhere. Before it was just computers on the front desk and a printer that went off every time someone was watching porn on the TV. Now it was everywhere, so it was a good idea to use it for TV. After about a year or two of this we started making the hardware ourselves as well, because there was nothing decent out there.

‘We didn’t get into the cloud until we won a contract to put WiFi in across the Waterstones network. It’s one thing to put a £2,000 server in a hotel with 200 rooms, but a bookstore can’t afford that. We had to find a way to scale it and that was the cloud.

‘In our industry, people don’t really embrace cloud. They make a lot of noise about it, but they haven’t got a clue. They see it more as being able to access a website from anywhere, we see it as a way to achieve infinite scaleability.

‘We design for things to fail, rather than try and stop them failing. To paraphrase Bill Baker, when we create something, we think of it as cattle, rather than a pet. What do I mean by this? Well, back in the day, we’d get have a server in the Comms Room and someone dusts its little vents and backs it up every night and if it failed, it was as if the world had ended. So it was a pet. If it dies, we’ll be sad. We’ll miss Fido. But we deal with cattle, we design for it to fail.

‘So rather than have one expensive thing with its redundancy and power supplies and all those nice things in the rack, I’m going to throw five cheap ones in there. And those five cost less than that one big one: if one breaks, it doesn’t matter because the others work. I don’t want to care about it, it hasn’t got a name, it’s got a number. And this is the idea of cattle.

‘And when I say design to fail, it’s important to design a system where you have, for example, guest information in multiple places, so you don’t need to worry if it breaks in one place, you’re covered.

‘You can also move things around and take advantage of economies of scale. Servers in Ireland might be 50% of the price of London and if you move everything there for the night, you save 50%. We have automated that and it’s about a 70% saving. For me, that is the true cloud and its true benefit.

‘And while it might be hard to set up the system from scratch, once you have done, there are significant benefits. We run updates every night, because it’s free to us and because we can.

‘And of course there are people muddying the waters, saying that if you can log into websites from anywhere, that’s the cloud, but those things break. But for it, it’s the reason why, for example, casting onto the TV is bulletproof and why we can scale around the world. The one true cloud has taken us, it’s given us the ability to be agile and respond quickly.

‘We want others to be agile, which is one of the reasons why we publish our APIs to partners and let them do what the like with them. We want to be a good partner and be open to it. And people stay because we’re good, not because we’re locking them in.

‘I would like to see this drive personalisation at scale. At the moment too many vendors are trying to hold onto their silos, but what we need to move towards is to stop caring about who owns hotel data and facilitate it. At the moment there is too much focus on asking the question first – like what is the guest’s favourite type of wine – then collecting the data. It should be data first, then using those learnings.’

James Richmond, CEO, Nevaya, discusses his journey from road-warrior entrepreneur to globe-spanning CEO

‘I didn’t always want to be an entrepreneur. When I was at school I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I did know that I wanted to keep my options open, so I chose the degree that would let me do that, which was engineering.

‘And it was good fun. But during my time at university I started up a tiny little business doing bookings for hotels in Devon  – the old way, with a telephone – and taking a commission. Then after university, when I was living at home, with my Mum asking me when I was going to get a job, I bumped back into Ben [Clifford, co-founder and CTO] who I had first met when we were 13. He had created an online hotel booking system and we decided to work together.

‘This was back in 2003 when wifi was taking off and we travelled around the country pitching the concept of installing the service in the guest room. We did that for a few months but it was a really hard sell – hotels weren’t convinced guests would need the service beyond the lobby. In the end we were saved by a bible college, the Assemblies of God, who took a leap of faith and saved us from having to get a real job.

‘At that point I was very much a founder, not CEO. I was just trying to pay the bills and move out of home, travelling around the country in my Rover and it was a slow process. There were some days where we thought we were going to run out of money, but we were saved by the generosity of our suppliers who let us delay payments and kept us afloat.

‘Ben had developed some amazingly good tech which enabled high-speed guest internet access and we started to gain traction. We added a third person, Eryk and then much later, in 2017, we decided to move into SaaS, which is where we operate today and which allowed us to move away from physical technology and having teams on the ground to being able to offer a global service.

‘That chance to build something is what attracts me to being an entrepreneur. We’re in 40-plus countries, working for some of the big hotel groups and we’re really gaining momentum, which is exciting. But it’s when you get that growth that the roles change, that you go from having to wear all the hats to trying to become a CEO.

‘It was a challenge taking that decision to grow. We had got to the position where we owned the business fully, had no VCs, and we had a really profitable business model. We realised we had bigger ambitions and goals, and decided to go for it, to reinvest, and exponentially accelerate the number of guests benefiting from our platform every year.

‘It was very much a decision point for the business because we could have stayed as we were. But we saw the potential to really change the guest travel experience and make a mark.

‘I’m a first-time CEO, I’ve never done it before. And equally, I’ve never seen the outside world, never learned from others how to be a CEO. It’s been a long, slow, slightly painful learning. We now have a senior leadership team and, for me, it means letting go of the big functions and acting and behaving in a different way to maximise the performance of the team. It feels very different.

‘It can be quite anxiety provoking and it’s hard to give up the things you love, the thrill of closing the next big deal. You need to have full trust in the team, not butting in and being a pain in the ass. I can’t become a bottleneck, people have to make decisions on their own.

‘It has given me the chance to lean into the big partnership relationships, but I am also enjoying building the team and helping to create that company culture. We’ve doubled our headcount in the last 12 months and it’s been great to see people collaborating and getting on. We had a team event recently where we flew people in from every corner of the world and it felt good, really good.

‘We want to have a true team spirit, a cohesiveness. If something goes wrong, it’s about helping to understand, not blame. We don’t believe in that ethos you can see in tech, of running people into the ground, that’s not who we are. During the pandemic we did have to run very lean for 18 months and it did stretch people too far.

‘We’re now operating from a place of balance, and always looking towards robots and automation so that we have the minimum possible effective team size that delivers the best possible service in the industry. The philosophy is always to look at how things are done, and looking if there are ways to automate it. Get the robots to do the hard work.

‘The people that are here are a very special group of people and our focus is around sustainably building the team but not adding headcount at an amazing rate just because you haven’t thought properly about an efficient business model.

‘We hope we are true innovators, and we’re bold, and we’ll take risks to to change things up. We’ve placed some big bets on our new product – not a crazy risk, but a calculated risk, because we believe in the much bigger market opportunity.

‘And from there? There are different paths depending on how far we get along the journey. The beauty of the long journey is that we still have 100% ownership of the business. The not so great part is it has been 20 years without a break. A break would be good. But at the moment I’m still caught up in the buzz.’

Nevaya’s Kevin Edwards reports on the sector’s evolving relationship with technology.

The hotel sector has had a difficult relationship with technology, but it’s starting to come together now, sort of. While I was waiting in an endless snaking queue to enjoy my seamless check-in experience in my Las Vegas hotel, I had time to contemplate how the technology is there, the appetite from investors is there, and yet there I still was, rummaging for the ID and credit card I had already uploaded online.

Why was I still standing there, enjoying the timeless friction of check-in, which unites us all? Maybe the problem is less about the product and the appetite and more about the capability to execute a plan and tie it back to the success metrics.

The event itself suggested that those on stage had at least been listening to those in the queue. Hyatt Hotels Corporation’s Mark Hoplamazian waxed lyrical about making the team member interface easier, hitting his stride about the importance of technology removing the image of guests speaking to the bowed foreheads of front desk staff stroking their keyboards. But when speaking to people in the field that use the systems, the frustrations are still there. It’s still far from three clicks.

We are seeing more of a split between how technology is being used in the guest experience, with the select service model looking to enforce behaviour through technology, whereas the upscale was using it to enable choice. Isn’t that the core of hospitality, giving the guest what they want? It depends how much you’re paying.

Using technology to help reduce the number of foreheads you need behind the front desk was a pressing concern for all. We heard about one employer who has invested in the recruitment process, utilising WhatsApp for the application process in the hope of attracting younger team members.

As we have seen elsewhere in the workplace, appetite for flexibility was driving people’s choices about where to work. Aimbridge offered the chance to swap shifts to any hotel in the portfolio (within one region), making for a varied and adaptable job.

What remains an important point to emphasise is that most technology companies are looking at how to reduce the amount of human time spent on tasks to solve the recruitment process, when in fact that can never solve the problem. A smorgasbord of solutions must be blended instead. And one of those should be paying people more.

The drive to the cloud continues. Loews Hotels & Co highlighted its ambition of having zero servers on-site, something we have championed with the launch of NevayaOne, which means great TV services, but no room full of black boxes confusing those employees who should be bent over the front desk.

AI was, of course, the main topic of conversation, after ChatGPT caught everyone’s imagination earlier this year. Predominantly, hotels imagined it would allow them to cut staffing. In most cases the savvy hotels have been using AI for some time in the form of, for example, machine learning. I acknowledge that there are some brands doing some great things, but let’s keep the AI bubble as a future aspiration and focus on building the technology blocks first.

We’re excited to announce that we are working with Leonardo Hotels, with 3,000 rooms already live with NevayaCast, we are helping give guests a better stay, with better content: the content they actually want.

James Richmond, co-founder & CEO, Nevaya, said: “Travellers like their home comforts and we are looking forward to helping Leonardo’s guests bring their own Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+ or other content to their hotel room TV.”

Twenty years ago Apple opened the iTunes music store, Beyoncé started her solo career with Crazy In Love and Nevaya had its official launch, winning our first customers, paying the rent and focusing on becoming the leading UK provider of hospitality WiFi.

Two decades on and we’re all still here and thriving. All three of us have stuck to our core expertise, but we’ve all expanded our scope. At Nevaya we’ve shifted our ambitions to being the world’s best hospitality SaaS platform for Casting (certified by Google), TV, WiFi and mobile.

Some things remain the same. We’re innovating every day. We’re proud of our reputation in the sector. We’re passionate about our dedicated team of Nevayans.

And most of all we’re thankful to our friends, family, partners and clients, including: IHG Hotels & Resorts, Accor, citizenM hotels, Forest Holidays and Mollie’s. Happy anniversary.