The Hotel In-Room Tablet Isn’t Dead, It May Even Be Evolving
Photo Credit: The base for the new Crave tablets include two USB charging ports. MGM Resorts
Skift Take
In a forty or even four hundred room hotel, in-room tablets are nice, but almost always feel like overkill. When you're talking thousands of rooms they may be the best way to communicate with the modern hotel guest.
Aria Resort & Casino is outfitting all of its 4,004 rooms this week with new tablets developed by UK-based Crave Interactive, designed to provide better guest messaging, streamlined in-room purchasing, and room management.
This is the biggest roll out for Crave to date. Last year, the company installed the next generation devices at a number of upscale boutique hotels in Britain. The full-size tablets use proprietary Crave Agent software, based on the Android operating system, in a locked-down environment that restricts uploading and downloading for the end user.
Part of MGM Resorts International, Aria opened inside the massive CityCenter complex on the Las Vegas Strip in 2009. At the time, it was the first large hotel to employ the Control4 “smart home” digital hub where guests could open drapes, set temperatures, illuminate the hallway Do Not Disturb light, etc., with their bedside remote device.
The new Crave tablets integrate the pre-existing Control4 room tech a
