For the 60-plus hotel GMs who turned up to hear Jacques Levy-Bonvin talk during HOFEX in May, one thing quickly became clear: here was a man with strong opinions on what’s wrong and what’s right about how hotels treat their guests.

But the concern he voiced was not with prices, food quality or staff friendliness. What irks him is the comfort that guests feel, or fail to feel, due to the technology being used in hotels.

Not information or telecommunications technology, but the very basic technologies used to create the indoor environment – heating, cooling, ventilation and lighting.

The systems used to control those basic technologies are very close to his heart.

Few people could claim to have as much experience and original thought on the subject of such hotel technical issues as Lévy.

After more than 20 years with Staefa Control Systems and its successors (Staefa is now part of the giant Siemens Group), and author of two books and countless papers and articles, Lévy has developed a comprehensive philosophy about how the hotel industry arrived at the technical position it now finds itself in, and where the future lies.

The core of his philosophy is that there are five types of comfort which need to be optimised – thermal, olfactory, technical, economic and emotional.

Although these need to be optimised for the guest, the benefits should equally flow to the staff and management as well. The better these comforts are provided, the more content and satisfied a guest will feel, and the larger proportion of that guest’s lifetime dollars will be spent in a particular hotel.

Thermal comfort is the subject of a massive 30 % of all guest complaints, according to a survey cited by Lévy.

Olfactory comfort refers to what our noses tell us, and there is no question that many a guest’s first inhalation upon entering a room has resulted in a call to the front desk.

Lévy claims that many hoteliers are still ignorant of the level of olfactory discomfort felt by their guests, let alone about how to solve the problems.

Technical comfort is Lévy’s way of describing how easy it is for a guest to use the guestroom and all its facilities. If the thermostat, remote control, energy-saving key-tag, telephone or (dare I say it?) the internet connection are difficult to use, this clearly makes the guest uncomfortable.

But do we think of it that way? Do we consider how off-putting it can be to be made to feel incompetent or uncomprehending?

Economic comfort reflects how the guest feels in terms of whether the services being provided match the expectation created by, among other things, the price being charged.

Lévy adds emotional comfort to this list, saying that this is what all hoteliers are trying to give their guests. The key to persuading "his majesty the businessman" to stay with you and not your competitor each night he or she is in your city can boil down to optimising this emotional comfort.

Lévy has two words to describe the hotel industry’s level of energy management sophistication: "Stone Age". He says that hotels waste 20 – 30 % of the energy they pay for due to "ignorance and neglect".

It would be one thing if hotels were overpaying for energy in order to achieve perfect indoor conditions and create indestructible customer loyalty, but the truth is that they waste this energy, and this money, and still fail to deliver any of the five comforts essential to ensure customer loyalty.

Likewise, Lévy believes that new hotels could be built to use 30 – 35 % less energy than those currently being opened.

Massively reduced energy costs and greatly increased guest comforts might sound almost too good to be true, but Lévy provides a roadmap to reach this goal.

He has prepared a global action plan that can be achieved in three steps:

As a representative of Siemens’ Landis & Staefa Division, Lévy is entitled to add a plug for the contribution his own company’s building management system can make, but he refrains.

By visiting his personal website, though (www.jlevy.ch), you can purchase his latest book so you can "come to grips with building management systems for hotels in general, and, in particular, for guestrooms in hotels."