A smarter hotel shuttle with Glympse and HERE location intelligence

We’ve joined with Glympse to provide hoteliers and guests with real-time location data for their courtesy shuttle fleets.

A wide array of thoughts might run through your mind when you’re waiting at the airport curb for your hotel’s courtesy shuttle.

Do they know where you are? How much longer will it be? Are they really on the way?

If you’ve thought any of these, you’re not alone. It’s estimated that 40-70% of incoming calls to hotels are inquiries about shuttles.

To ease the friction of the courtesy shuttle experience, HERE and Glympse are announcing the jointly-developed Shuttle Tracker, the first analytics tool of its kind in the market. The app provides location intelligence, map data and analytics that can be used across smartphone applications, websites and mobile notifications. The services can be leveraged for hotel staff as well as their guests in transit.

Courtesy shuttles, when first offered, were a big incentive for guests to stay at certain hotels. In our digital era, rideshare apps like Lyft and Uber have raised the bar of consumer expectation. The ability to see your vehicle, your driver, and their location has become the norm. Put simply, in today’s world, asking a guest to wait by the curb for a van that “should be there soon” is no longer an ideal business practice.

Shuttle Tracker will provide hotel guests with real-time visibility of their shuttle’s location, their contextual ETA, and alerts for arrival at their location. Meanwhile, on the back end, operations staff can put comprehensive metrics and analytics to work to optimize vehicle routes, move shuttles where they’re most needed, and receive real-time arrival alerts to avoid pile-ups at check-in.

Courtesy shuttles can be a major competitive differentiator for hospitality brands – but the guests that take advantage of those services are often frustrated due to the anxiety of uncertainty. Shuttle Tracker is intended to bring modern visibility to an established amenity, improving the guest experience while lowering operational costs.

We’re thrilled to partner with Glympse to provide this solution, and we’re looking forward to developing combined user solutions that connect consumers with the businesses and service providers they’re looking for.

To find out more, or to see a demo, come see Glympse/HERE at HITEC 2018 in Houston.