The paper compendium is a staple of all hotels regardless of the number of stars attached to their brand. And while the compendium is critical to ensuring that guests have the right information in a relatively convenient place, ensuring that these paper compendiums are up to date and relevant is wasteful, expensive and inconvenient.
The paper compendium - A waste of paper
Every year, hotels print thousands of pages for their compendiums. And yet, as soon as these pages are printed, they become obsolete as menus, phone numbers and information changes at the hotel. This constant printing and changing information creates hundreds of kilograms of paper waste every year.
At the same time, modern luxury travellers are increasingly choosing to stay at hotels that demonstrate a commitment to being sustainability.
Being eco-friendly is no longer an option, but rather a critical component of providing a luxury, five star experience for guests. Luxury travelers are expecting to see that their hotel is committed to sustainability, and nothing can ruin this expectation faster than entering their room for the first time and seeing a thick, rarely used, paper compendium.
The paper compendium - A waste of money
Printing all that paper to fill your compendium is not only a waste of paper, but it is also a waste of money. Every year, hotels spend thousands of dollars printing, updating and eventually throwing out compendiums. We can assume that much of that printing is only viewed a limited number of times, but even that is purely speculative because we cannot measure how often each page is turned, looked at, or used.
The paper compendium - A waste of time
Ensuring that your compendium is always up to date and relevant to your guests comes with many operational challenges. Replacing a restaurant menu in a 60 page compendium for 300 rooms is an extremely manual process that can be is error prone, and an inefficient use of your hotel staff’s time.
And because updating the compendium is extremely manual and inefficient process, hotel GM’s and staff need to be strategic in both they type and frequency of information they want to put in their compendiums. This makes the information in their compendiums more generic and less specific to current happenings at the hotel. As a result, the compendium is less relevant and useful to guests, which means that the guest will spend less time looking at the compendium.
A printed compendium exists in a vicious cycle. If it is difficult and expensive to update, is less relevant to guests. If it is less relevant to guests, guests don’t use it. If guests don’t use it, hotels are less likely to update material and the cycle continues.
Digitize your compendium with Portier
The Portier Phone welcomes your guests the same way that a compendium does. But unlike the traditional paper compendium, the Portier Phone’s digital compendium will help you to create a better guest and operational experience by:
Giving your guests information in a convenient, engaging, and eco-friendly way
Saving your hotel thousands of dollars in printing costs
Making updates to your compendium, fast, efficient, and scalable
A convenient, eco friendly, inexpensive, digital compendium
The Portier compendium is created and managed using the Portier portal. Because it is a digital platform rather than a paper one, hotels can update compendiums daily or even hourly, rather than monthly or quarterly.
Instead of going room to room to update the paper compendiums, hotels can update their compendiums with the tap of a button. This allows the information in the compendium to be up to date, relevant to the days activities, and, if needed, translated quickly into a variety of languages.
From a revenue standpoint, the Portier phones not only save the hotel thousands of dollars every year in printing costs, but it also allows the hotel to further promote themselves as an eco-friendly and sustainable property- helping to attract and retain valuable luxury travelers.
To find out more about how Portier can make your compendium more relevant, engaging and inexpensive, contact sales@goportier.com.