What guests actually do with the hotel TV

We want to thank Amanda Baltazar at Hotel Management for a thoughtful piece on in-room entertainment that ran in the June/July print edition. She spoke with Innspire President Anne Frye, alongside Nikolai Ursin from Virgin Hotels and Robin Koetje from Staypineapple. The conversation covered what guests expect, what they actually use, and what the television means for hotel revenue.

The expectation has changed

Guests no longer arrive at a hotel wondering what entertainment is available. They arrive knowing exactly what they want to watch and expecting to find a way to watch it. The shift the article describes is precise: hotels used to offer content; now guests bring their own and need a frictionless way to get it onto the screen.

That is why Innspire TV runs natively on Samsung and LG hospitality Smart TVs with Google Cast embedded. No dongle, no set-top box. Guests cast from their own device in seconds. Anne describes the result clearly: less hardware, less for hotel staff to manage, and a cleaner room for the guest.

What the screen can know about the guest

The welcome screen moment when a guest walks in and sees their name is not decoration. It opens the door to content that is relevant to them specifically: conference agendas for attendees, wellness options for rooms with yoga mats or Peloton equipment, VIP recommendations for a jazz bar they might actually visit.

Nikolai Ursin, director of brand marketing at Virgin Hotels, describes the philosophy behind it: "Our whole brand philosophy is taking the friction out of travel." Guests want to catch the next episode. The hotel's job is to make sure they can.

The television as a revenue channel

This is the part most GMs know intellectually but not always at the number level. Anne puts it directly: the screen is a marketing and relationship hub. When in-room dining is integrated with the hotel's POS through the TV, some properties are driving up to $60,000 in ancillary revenue per month. The spa, local experiences, and advertising partnerships from nearby businesses add further to that.

Pay-per-view may be gone but the revenue it generated has been replaced, and then some. Ursin at Virgin Hotels confirms the same: in-room dining revenue through the TV more than offsets what was lost when movies went away.

What guests are actually watching

One of the more grounding findings in the piece: 55% of interactions with Innspire TV are traditional broadcast television. Guests, especially those travelling for business in city-centre hotels, want the news and the weather in the morning. They are not there to watch films. Casting accounts for the other 45%, and tends to happen when guests have more time and a longer session in mind.

What this tells a GM: reliability and speed matter more than the number of apps on offer. Guests want to get to what they need without navigating menus that do not add anything.

The full article is worth reading for the detail on how different properties are approaching this, from Staypineapple's 30-second QR cast to the way Virgin Hotels uses the screen across its two-chamber room design. Read Amanda's piece in full on Hotel Management.