How an Indian Traveller’s Journey will change with Beacons?

You reach the Terminal 1D of Indira Gandhi Airport in Delhi for an early morning flight to Mumbai. The moment you step-in, your mobile receives a new notification on where your airline counter is. You also get an exact direction and the distance i.e. the number of steps you have to take. Once you receive your boarding pass and proceed towards the security check, you get a notification on your departure gate making the whole flying process a cakewalk!

Welcome to a completely whole new way to travel with Beacons! What we are talking about isn’t the future of travel. Beacons have been already implemented across many airports, hotels and even points of interests in different countries and expect this to be a part of your travel experience at the world’s best airport sometime very soon.

Beacons by Estimote, Inc: One of the most popular companies out in this space.

What are Beacons?

Beacons re-define the customer experience in physical retail and at all touch-points where there is a real-time interaction involved. Simply speaking, beacons ride on BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) to push targeted and contextual messages to your mobile app the moment you walk-in within their proximity. BLE enables transmission of messages over short distances with a range of few meters using little battery power.

Here is a quick look at how your entire experience is bound to change with Beacons:

Your Hotel Stay

Trouble-free checkin experience

When you check-in to any hotel in India, you undergo a typical drill at the reception where you have to share your passport/photo-id copy (example your pan-card), hotel reservation voucher and then the room is allocated to you. We are so used to a paper driven approach! This adds to your anxiety and if the queue is long, it also tests your patience.

With beacons, your check-in will happen in a jiffy as it will auto detect your name, contact info & your booking details once you step-in to the hotel lobby!

Keyless entry 

Starwood hotels, one of the earliest adopters of this concept has implemented a program called SPG Keyless™ available via SPG® app which enables its guests to have a completely keyless entrance and use their smart-phones to open their room door-locks.

Guests simply need to download the app on their Android or iOS device and need to configure it to receive notifications from a participating property if it has a keyless program implemented. The feature is available to Starwood Preferred Guests and is available across a list of worldwide properties. Unfortunately, none of the Indian cities are present in the list at the moment.

The SPG iOS app

Configuration of Keyless settings on the SPG iOS app

Imagine beacons guiding you about the restaurants in your hotel, their timings, in-room dining services and what not! It opens a whole new world of possibilities altogether

Beacons in your favorite museum or architectural property

Every time you visit a Museum, you either hire a guide or prefer to be self-guided. You stand in-front of those wonderful pieces of art, wondering about their significance and try to read behind the history. Sometimes you get bored and in a way it even limits your experience at these locations of historical significance.

But Philips Museum in Eindhoven is trying something unique with its interactive iBeacon game called Mission Eureka. Watch the video to learn more!!

Does sound exciting indeed? You never know what’s in-store for you, the next time you visit Delhi’s National Museum or Charminar in the city of Nizams

With seamless availability of GPS being a challenge in India, beacons might just provide the much needed boost to the Indian tourism & travel industry. Know of any Indian travel brands using beacons in an interesting way? Do share them with us!