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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Hotels

Grubhub and Resorts World Las Vegas Partner on New Hotel Concept

Resorts World Las Vegas has announced a partnership with Grubhub for a new mobile order service. Guests of the forthcoming Resorts World Las Vegas property will be able to use the service to get food, drinks, and retail items for delivery and pickup during their stay.

Dubbed On The Fly at Resorts World Powered by Grubhub, the service lets guests order from all of the resort’s onsite food and beverage locations as well as certain retail stores. Items can be scheduled for pickup or delivered to the guest’s hotel room or the resort’s pool complex.

To use the service, Resorts World guests either access the Grubhub app or scan one of the many QR codes that will be located throughout the property. Users will also get the option to charge the purchase to their room, just as they would with a traditional room service order, or use their credit card. For poolside deliveries, guests access their order at a QR-code activated restaurant locker on the pool deck. 

The 88-acre Resorts World Las Vegas property will include three Hilton hotel brands in addition to the usual trappings of a Las Vegas property — casino, stores, restaurants, etc. The whole thing is slated to open this week, on June 24. 

It also marks the first time Grubhub’s service has been available at a hotel/casino property. The sheer size of Resorts World Las Vegas — three hotels and 40 food/bev outlets in an 88-acre property — gives Grubhub automatic access to a potentially huge customer base in Sin City. 

Last week, Netherlands-based Just Eat Takeaway.com said it had completed its acquisition of Grubhub, a $7.3 million all-stock deal that was originally announced one year ago. Currently, Grubhub’s strongest markets are New York City, Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia. 

C3 Will Launch Its Virtual Food Halls Inside Graduate’s ‘College Town’ Hotels

Food and bev platform C3 (Creating Culinary Communities) this week announced a new partnership with Graduate Hotels to launch the Graduate Food Hall digital kitchen concept. For the venture, C3 will bring its ghost kitchen and virtual restaurant hybrid to Graduate Hotels, which are located in America’s college towns, in the first quarter of 2021. 

C3 operates a number of virtual restaurant brands, including Krispy Rice, the delivery-only version of Umami Burger, a collaborative plant-based concept with Impossible, and a caviar bar. The company prepares all orders in its own network of ghost kitchens, which is steadily growing. For instance, C3 just acquired 22 former locations of the now-shuttered chain Speciality’s and plans to convert those into kitchen spaces. 

For the Graduate partnership, C3 said it is effectively taking over onsite food operations at Graduate properties. Graduate’s hotel kitchens will be converted into “multi-brand kitchens” that can house several C3 restaurant concepts at once. Both hotel guests and those in the surrounding community will be able to order delivery meals and those for takeout. There will also be some seating in hotel lobbies and gathering areas.

The U.S. hotel industry had its worst year on record in 2020 in terms of both lows in occupancy and revenue because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Data provider STR noted that hotels passed the 1 billion rooms unsold mark in 2020, the highest in the industry’s history, and that the first half of 2021 will likely be similar (though conditions are expected to improve in the latter half of this year).

Setting up a virtual food hall that can serve both hotel guests and surrounding homes, schools, and businesses opens up potentially more revenue opportunities for Graduate. At the same time, Graduate’s locations, which are all in major “college towns” around the U.S., will expose C3 and its virtual restaurant brands to a huge number of potential users because of the proximity to universities. 

The first implementation of the Graduate Food Hall is expected to debut in Berkeley, California as well as Richmond, Virginia and Tempe, Arizona. Additional locations will follow.  

Could Alexa in Hotel Rooms Boost Amazon’s Restaurant Delivery Biz?

My wife is a frequent business traveler, and before I could even finish asking her if she’d like Alexa in her hotel room, she answered “Hell yeah.” Evidently, her first impulse upon walking into her hotel room is to ask Alexa what time it is, and what the weather will be the next day. If she could order up room service — she’d be all set.

So it appears that Amazon is on to something with its new Alexa for Hospitality program. Amazon’s virtual assistant will be available this summer in select Marriott, Westin, and St. Regis hotels, among others.

Alexa enabled rooms will allow guests to play music, find local businesses, order room service, contact housecleaning, call the front desk, check out and more all by just asking. Amazon says that soon guests will be able to connect their own Alexa accounts so they can call contacts, access personal music and listen to their audiobooks.

Hanging over all this is whether you want an always-listening device in your hotel room. And that is a legitimate concern, but here at The Spoon, we’re most interested in the eating part of Alexa for Hospitality and where that will go.

At its most basic, the ability to order room service through Alexa is pretty cool! And this could be an easy way for hotels to increase the amount of money guests spend on food. Each time a guest walks into a room or wakes up or asks Alexa a question is an opportunity for the hotel to advertise a happy hour, wine tasting or other experience that involves spending money.

There’s also an opportunity to upsell guests as they order room service (“Would you like to add a glass of wine with that?”) And while the data hotels collect from Alexa will be anonymized and aggregated, creating an Alexa skill tied to loyalty or rewards programs could yield even more opportunities for personalization when you can connect your account to the hotel Echo.

As with most things with Amazon, Alexa for Hospitality isn’t just about selling a bunch of devices to hotels. It’s about broadening Amazon’s ecosystem to get you to use more of its services.

So consider what Alexa devices in hotel rooms could do for Amazon’s restaurant delivery business. You could ask Alexa for a local Thai restaurant recommendation, and have that food delivered to your door.

This assumes, of course, that hotels allow that type of functionality. They may be inclined to block food ordering from outside restaurants and drive you to the hotel eatery’s $25 cheeseburger.

But money talks, yadda yadda, if Amazon figured out a way for the hotel to wet their beak on the outside delivery transaction, management could probably find a way to make it happen. In fact, funneling all of the guests through Alexa to order food from the outside could ensure that the hotel gets a cut of every transaction instead of missing out as people just order food on their own through Grubhub or UberEats or Dominoes.

Given the popularity of virtual assistants, I wouldn’t be surprised if they became as standard as mini-bars in hotel rooms. With the ability to add skills that increase revenue and choice for the guests? That could have everyone saying “hell yeah.”