The moment a guest walks through the hotel lobby, their experience is already taking shape. How long is the queue? Is there a member of staff free? How quickly can they get to their room? Get it right and you've set the tone for the entire stay. Get it wrong and it's the first thing they mention in their review.
For hotels, that arrival window is one of the most operationally demanding moments of the day. Peak check-in periods create surges that are hard to staff for, and routine transactions keep pulling front-desk teams away from the kind of personal service that actually builds loyalty. Guests, meanwhile, expect something faster and more frictionless than a queue.
It's a challenge the wider industry is taking seriously. The global hotel self-check-in and check-out kiosk market is forecast to grow from approximately $2.6 billion in 2026 to nearly $5 billion by 2032, driven by growing demand for contactless technology and operational automation. The direction of travel is clear, executing it well is where most operators run into difficulty.
We're delighted to have been invited by long-term technology partner Zebra Technologies to contribute to their latest whitepaper, published on Kiosk Marketplace, which explores exactly this challenge.
The paper draws on our work deploying intelligent self-service kiosks within a major UK hotel environment, and looks at how the right combination of hardware, software and scanning technology can genuinely shift the guest experience. The whitepaper covers the specifics of what that looks like at scale.
Central to that is the scanning technology that powers the check-in interaction. Guests present QR codes, booking confirmations and loyalty credentials directly from their smartphones, which sounds straightforward until you factor in the reality of someone arriving after a long journey with a cracked screen and a phone on minimal battery.
Zebra's MS4717 Fixed Mount Imager, which features their PRZM Intelligent Imaging technology, is built to handle exactly that. It's a core component across the majority of Evoke's customer-facing kiosk platforms for good reason.
"Zebra is our key scan engine partner," said Neil Dorrian, Sales and Marketing Director at Evoke. "Most devices we supply tend to have a scanner. The key thing from a Zebra perspective is the ability to scan from a mobile phone when the battery may be low. This is a real benefit."
When a scan fails, it doesn't just frustrate the guest in front of the kiosk. It chips away at confidence in self-service as a whole. For adoption to hold, the hardware has to work every time.
The whitepaper also looks at where hotel self-service is heading next. Kiosks are no longer simply transaction terminals. Operators are beginning to use them as guest engagement tools that carry commercial value across the whole stay, from targeted upsell offers at check-in to concierge services, meal ordering and automated checkout.
"We've seen use cases of kiosks being used as information points as well," Dorrian said. "A concierge service, finding out what's in a particular area - all of those informational aspects can be delivered via the kiosk too."
"These projects can fundamentally change the way customers interact with and view a brand. Hospitality kiosk projects are no longer simply technology installations."
The full whitepaper goes into much more detail on the technology behind the deployment, the operational outcomes and what the future of hotel self-service looks like. We'd encourage anyone working in hospitality to give it a read.