Once upon a time, on hotel reception desks, there was the bell and behind it the bellhop that jumped up at the customer’s call. After the bell came intercoms and the first phones. Since then things kept evolving rapidly and today the fate of the hospitality industry seems to be inextricably linked to the advent of smartphones.
According to analysts, 2017 has been the year of these “mobile allies” and now as technology moves the world and firms of all market sectors cannot survive without it, the hospitality industry is riding the digital revolution wave with a particular focus towards digital mobility as the use of smartphones seems to affect all businesses including hotels. Smartphone diffusion indexes, that had already been impressive in 2016, grew from 2.1 billion users to 2.31 in 2017 and will be around 2.5 billion in 2019 (just over 36 percent of the world’s population is projected to use a smartphone by 2018).
