If you have specific questions about SuitePad, the digital guest folder, or other related topics you'll find everything you need to know right here.

Here we have clarified the most frequently asked questions on the following topics:
  1. General Questions
  2. Technical Details
  3. SuitePad Devices




General Questions

There are several channels through which a SuitePad installation can generate ROI for hoteliers. The most direct channels include offering a digital sales platform that drives sales at a hotel’s in-house outlets such as room service, spa and leisure activities, and the hotel gift shop. Other features such as the Green Option, push notifications, and digitally administered late check-out options enable new streams of revenue that non-digital folders simply can’t provide. Find out more about SuitePad’s Green Option, push notifications, and how to boost in-room dining sales using SuitePads with these insights from our resources page.

At SuitePad, we understand that hotels thrive on ensuring a strong bond between staff and guests—after all, it’s these strong relationships that make guests want to return to your premises. Digital technology has a reputation for being impersonal when compared to face-to-face service, but this reputation is changing as more tech companies focus on welcoming and highly personalized customer-facing interfaces and tools. At SuitePad, our products are designed with maintaining—and even improving—the hotel-guest relationship at the forefront of our design process. This is why we don’t envision SuitePad as taking the place of hotel staff, but rather as a platform that offers additional and new channels of communication between hotel staff and guests. Using push notifications, in-room telephone calls, and other forms of digital communication, your hotel staff are given more opportunities to personalize the experience for your guests. Additionally, as a SuitePad installation refines and streamlines many hotel processes, your staff can spend more time doing their most important job—making your guests feel welcome!

Mini bar sales contribute significant mark-up for hotels. As SuitePads offer a great solution for two-way communication, they allow guests to notify staff that the mini bar needs to be topped up in a room, even if there’s no room cleaning taking place in that room. This helps drive mini bar sales, and many customers have successfully used this process during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Hotel guests that suffer from medical impairments—such as visual or physical impairment—will find there are options that may help them when using SuitePad devices. The letter size can easily be increased on a SuitePad device, helping people who may have visual impairments. This is an advantage that SuitePad’s Digital Guest Directory and SuitePad TV Control have over traditional paper-based hotel guest directories and analog TV controls.

As the SuitePad device can also be integrated into the hotel room’s in-room controls, it can provide a convenient central control system for physically impaired guests. Functions such as controlling lights, in-room temperature, and drapes can all be centrally controlled using the SuitePad if it is integrated with the relevant in-room control system.

At SuitePad, we have customers of all sizes—from small-scale independent hotels to major international hotel chains. Our philosophy is the same towards every customer: to improve communication between hoteliers and guests, improving the experience for both. Therefore, it makes no difference whether you are a 10 room B&B or a global hotel chain, we’ll put all of our efforts into ensuring SuitePad exceeds your expectations.

Over the years SuitePad has shown great success in various different hotels. The advantage for MICE hotels is that they can upsell services to busy business travelers who have little time to waste. This is a great benefit for any group planner.

SuitePads are currently in operation in over 30 countries worldwide. While SuitePad's core markets are in Europe, the UAE, and Asia, there are installations all over the world, including the US and Caribbean. At SuitePad, we will work with customers anywhere in the world.

Many potential customers ask about how much they can expect their revenue to increase with SuitePad. While we do usually see revenue increase, the amount that it increases by usually depends on a variety of factors such as hotel type, the effort that hotel staff put into their solution, and the variety of in-house outlets a hotel might have. One thing you can be sure of is that with SuitePad, you will be paired with a dedicated account manager who will help you set up and refine your SuitePad solution so that it maximises the amount of revenue you receive.

Typically, SuitePad can replace all paper-based collateral, in-room phones, TV remotes, and even control panels for AC, lights, blinds and DND status.

The SuitePad solution itself is eye-catching and our data shows that around 80% of the guests will use it on a daily basis. This makes it easy to promote services. In addition, special topics can be pushed to all or individual guest rooms to create additional attention.

While it’s a very rare occurrence, some guests do decide to steal items from hotel rooms. SuitePad has devised several safeguards against theft that discourage guests from stealing the in-room tablets.

  1. Guests are made aware that they cannot use the tablets outside of the hotel as they are set in kiosk mode and that SuitePads are theft protected.
  2. Once a guest accepts the terms and conditions, the burden of proof of theft is on the guest, not on the hotel. Therefore, in the unlikely scenario that a guest is suspected to have stolen a device, they are legally obliged to prove that they have not stolen it. This protects the hotel from liability in this unlikely scenario.
  3. SuitePad has an optional insurance coverage policy for the SuitePad devices that insures against breakage and theft.

SuitePad can integrate with specific property management systems (PMS) to provide a more automated experience for hotels. We offer three types of integration: Direct (via IT3), through the FIAS protocol, and through Impala.

SuitePad takes data protection very seriously. As a limited company registered in Germany, SuitePad is fully compliant with the EU’s GDPR regulations. Due to the way the SuitePad system software works, no guest information is stored in the SuitePad nor the hotel system unless guests expressly consent to do so—although this is not a requirement for them to use their SuitePad devices in full. As SuitePad adheres to the EU’s GDPR regulations, hotels in non-EU member states can rest assured that there is a high level of data protection. For more information on how SuitePad meets GDPR requirements, check out this blog post.



 

Technical Details

SuitePad has features that affect in-room TV entertainment: SuitePad TV Control for example. SuitePad TV Control enables hotel guests to control their TV device using the SuitePad TV Control digital interface through the SuitePad built-in infrared blaster. This feature works with all TVs that have a built-in infrared receptor.

At SuitePad, we design all our hardware ourselves using data and insight from top hoteliers around the world. Our devices are built in a factory in China to our specific designs and requirements. The facilities are regularly visited and inspected by our technicians and managing directors. Find out more about how and where SuitePads are made here. Once the tablets are built, they are sent to our SuitePad head office in Berlin. Here, they undergo a series of rigorous quality checks before the operating system is installed. When a new customer orders a SuitePad installation, we upload their SuitePad installation to all the tablets in our head office before shipping them via express mail. Installing the operating system and SuitePad installation in the SuitePad head office allows us to ensure there are no data security risks.

Wifi access and a permanent power supply are necessary for SuitePad's solution to be installed at any hotel. Some features such as VoIP require additional requirements. To learn more about these, contact our staff who will be able to help advise you.

SuitePad will guide you through the installation process. With your dedicated account manager, you will create the SuitePad interface that you want for your hotel. Then, your account manager will install your SuitePad devices and all related software for you, or perform a remote installation, guiding you the whole way. To find out more about the installation process, check out this blog post.

The administration is far less time consuming than physical guest directories as all content can be changed with just a few clicks.

At SuitePad, we understand that when things go wrong, you need them cleared up as soon as possible—after all, time is money! Every SuitePad customer will have a dedicated account manager who can help with day-to-day, non-urgent issues.

However, if an urgent problem should arise, we have a 24-hour technical support hotline where you can get help from our technical experts.

For any technical problem, please contact our hotline service by phone +49 30 319 850 110 or by email at support@suitepad.de.

 

The beauty of technology is how fast it changes and upgrades, however, the downside of this is the need to keep pace. At SuitePad, we are at the forefront of hotel tech. We constantly use insight from customers and industry leaders to create new and innovative solutions as well as upgrade and evolve existing ones. As a SuitePad customer, you will always have access to new technology updates as soon as they are released at no extra cost. You will also have the opportunity to upgrade or add additional SuitePad solutions at any time during your SuitePad contract.

All SuitePad customers see both tangible and intangible benefits from installing SuitePads. Many customers see an increase in orders through hotel outlets such as room service, spa bookings, and restaurant bookings. Many hotels also fully finance their SuitePad subscription through SuitePad’s Green Option feature, which generates significant cost savings. From a financial perspective, the SuitePad is a smart solution, but there are also many benefits that you can’t put a price on, such as increasing guest satisfaction, providing a more complete service, and increasing the number of return guests. Overall, these benefits will also bring in money while also improving the hotel’s reputation. In this sense, SuitePad is very much worth the investment.

SuitePad provides all customers with an innovative CMS. With this cloud-based system, hotel staff can receive and administrate ordering and reservation requests. We can also integrate partner systems from our customers or prepare an API interface if possible. In general, customers love to use our CMS because there are no additional costs. They are also able to track statistics of their different departments on one dashboard via SuitePad.

 

 

SuitePad devices

One of SuitePad's unique selling points is the customized installation that aligns with your hotel's corporate identity and design. Our dedicated Content Managers carefully integrate your branding into the tablets' software, creating a final product that is one and dear to your hotel. 

In this blog post, we explore the design process of SuitePad in-room tablets.

After signing the contract, the onboarding process begins. This typically takes 6 to 8 weeks, depending on the inputs received from the hotel. Our valuable Project Managers assist you with your onboarding to make sure everything works smoothly. We offer a fast-track onboarding option for hotels that promptly provide all the necessary information. 

You can find more information about the Onboarding here.

In general, we can link to every additional system via deeplink in our BYOD solution. This means that if there are online shops, online table reservations, online check-in based on weblinks, they can also be accessed through the BYOD solution.

With SuitePad, not only can you promote your hotel app, but you can also maintain the content through SuitePad's CMS. Hotel staff get access to the SuitePad Content Management System. There, among other things, content can be changed, requests and orders can be processed, and push notifications sent to guests, either manually or automatically.

If you want different designs for the sub-brands or your hotel chain, or even individualized tablet interfaces for each of your hotels, that's no problem! SuitePad can build several different designs on the same SuitePad contract, ensuring your hotel brand is maintained across all your establishments while also giving them each some individuality.

All content from your website can be integrated in the SuitePad content either by weblink integration or iframe integration.

As part of our installation service we prepare all settings on every single device at our head office before shipping the tablets to the hotel. However, we can show you a demo installation and device to exhibit what your installation may look.

Even though SuitePad is primarily an in-room communication solution, SuitePad tablets can also be used in various hotel outlets. Many SuitePad customers use the tablets in F&B outlets or meeting areas. Depending on the use case, SuitePad can support you when installing tablets in non-hotel room areas of your hotel.

The roomservice ordering and Green Option functions tend to be the most popular with guests.

Yes. As a hotel chain user, you will have access to all hotels belonging to the hotel chain. You can therefore update all information simultaneously, or pick and choose which information you would like to update in which hotels. For example, you may only want to update certain information at European hotels. SuitePad is designed to be easy to use and flexible when managing a large number of properties.

Do you have any further questions?

Feel free to contact us.