Why Bluetooth Mesh Is Perfect for the Smart Hotel Room

There was a time when hotels were the first to bring the latest technology to their guests. When TVs were not yet an affordable everyday product, hotels introduced TV rooms where guests could watch the program together. Later, every hotel room was equipped with a TV set, long before a TV appeared in every living room.

But hotels have not been trendsetters for quite some time. While you can already find smart home installations and voice assistants like Amazon Alexa or Google Home in numerous homes, you look in vain for such standards in hotels. But there are good reasons for this.

Obstacles of the Smart Hotel

Expensive Wiring

Every actuator – light switches, sockets, heating and air conditioning – must be networked with each other. In professional installations, this is almost universally done by hard-wiring. The cabling of the actuators often does not remain locally in the room, but runs together in a central server room in the hotel. If you add up the cost of wiring alone for several dozen or even hundreds of hotel rooms, you quickly reach immensely high sums.

Proprietary & Suboptimal Radio Solutions

Wireless solutions such as ZigBee or Z-Wave have partly been used in professional installations. But the problem here is that every ZigBee or Z-Wave network requires a central gateway. This makes an installation in hotels complex and extremely time-consuming. Especially in larger hotels, one encounters limitations in range and complexity.

Complex Software

Simply wiring actuators does not make a smart hotel room possible. This requires software that can automate meaningful use cases or apps that the hotel guest can use to control the room. BUS cabling is often used, which can only be programmed with complex software. These BUS systems often have to be linked to the hotel's building management system at great expense.

Complex Retrofitting

Until now, retrofitting was hardly possible because it is very costly to install cables for the smart upgrade of the actuators. Walls must usually be torn open and then plastered again.

Bluetooth Mesh in the Smart Hotel Room

Bluetooth Mesh solves the existing obstacles of the smart hotel room in a single stroke. The use of Bluetooth Mesh eliminates the need for expensive wiring. It is also possible to turn any hotel room into a smart hotel room in a retrofit by simply replacing the actuators.

Because Bluetooth Mesh does not require a gateway or a central hub, each hotel room can be a completely self-sufficient network. It is not necessary to install hardware apart from the actuators themselves in the room.

Offline Setup and Configuration

Setup and subsequent modification of device configurations can be carried out within a few minutes or even seconds without specialist knowledge, without a laptop, and without paid software. The MESHLE app can be used, for example, to specify which lights or actuators the switch next to the bed controls. A welcome light can also be set so that the lighting in the hotel room ramps up slowly and pleasantly.

IoT-Ready Buildings

In a similar dilemma as hotel operators are also project developers. Not only for hotel rooms is it too expensive and too complex to wire all actuators and sensors with BUS systems – also for entire buildings, BUS wiring or a proprietary radio-based solution is undesirable.

Bluetooth Mesh is proving to be a future-proof technology for networking individual hotel rooms up to entire buildings. With “Qualified Bluetooth Mesh,” an international, open standard for building networking is currently establishing itself.

Cloud Applications

Another advantage of Bluetooth Mesh is that integration into the hotel's internal network (intranet) as well as the internet are optional. Even if one decides to connect the network to the internet, it is not necessary to approve each individual device with its own IP address in the firewall. Only one standardized Bluetooth Mesh Wi-Fi gateway is required – for example, per hotel room – to securely connect all actuators and sensors to the cloud.

The cloud expands the functional scope of a Bluetooth Mesh installation. For example, open property management systems (PMS) can be connected via the cloud without much effort. This means, for example, that the heating only heats to the comfort temperature while a guest is checked in. A MESHLE guest control system can also be installed through the cloud, allowing guests to control their hotel room with their own smartphone without having to download an app.

Conclusion

Bluetooth Mesh is not only an interesting and future-proof technology for the smart home or smart building. It has many advantages for hotel rooms in particular, which are much more difficult to realize with conventional technologies. Bluetooth Mesh enables a decentralized yet fully automated and smart hotel of the future.