Many factors determine whether travellers feel comfortable during a hotel stay. With our expertise, we help our customers adapt their hotel technology to the needs of their guests. 

Amid rising energy prices, global warming and a shortage of skilled labour, the tourism industry is suffering from enormous pressure to survive and stay profitable. Adding to this pressure, guest behaviour is changing, with digitalisation playing a key role and environmentally conscious consumers favouring hotels that practise sustainability with energy-efficient building management solutions. Hoteliers must find new ways to adapt. 

The technical solutions for the hotel industry are as varied and individual as each project. Buro Happold’s experts carefully analyse the requirements of our customers to ensure that each project receives the best possible solution. 

Room automation

Room automation or smart room technology are no longer simply buzzwords. Integrated smart technologies that detect when rooms are occupied enable hotel building managers to reduce their carbon footprint, save on energy costs, and improve staffing allocation. Combined with modern energy generation, such as heat pumps and photovoltaic systems, they offer great potential for reducing energy requirements and, therefore, costs.   

Room automation is particularly useful in hotels, as guests are often absent for long periods of time. During these times, the room temperature can be lowered accordingly, thereby reducing energy consumption.  

However, the potential of integrated room automation is often not utilised sufficiently in the day-to-day running of a hotel. As a result, only energy efficiency class C is achieved. Clients benefit from our breadth of expertise, with our energy experts advising on solutions to realise classes B or A, demonstrating that comfort can be increased and energy costs reduced.  

A smartphone in a hotel room

Digital comfort

To achieve increased convenience and enhance customer experience for guests, hoteliers may deploy for instance a standardised user interface or an app for smartphones that lets guests check in contactless and operate door locks, thermostats, blinds and speakers.  

In addition to controlling the lighting and air conditioning, guests can use their smartphone to gain access to their room, call room service, operate the entertainment system, call up FAQs and much more.   

Between embedded connectivity and network management, smart room technologies provide hoteliers and hospitality managers with a host of new opportunities and a new level of operational efficiency. 

By connecting these systems, guest data and information is available to the staff at the touch of a button. The parameters in the rooms can be adjusted centrally via a management control unit. Faults, breakages or hazards are localised more quickly and downtimes are minimised.    

Technology can also mitigate the shortage of skilled labour. Self-service check-in, cleaning on demand, voice assistants, computer-aided facility management (CAFM) and artificial intelligence are just a few of the smart capabilities that come into play here.

Smart screen in modern bedroom

Services we offer:


  • Site surveys and investigations  
  • Technical due diligence condition survey  
  • Energy performance assessment  
  • Design review of landlord proposals  
  • Design review of tenant proposals   
  • Detailed tenant fit-out designs  
  • Site supervision and quality control  
  • Framework agreements  
  • People movement  
  • Health, wellbeing and productivity  
  • MEP engineering  
  • Building physics  
  • Structural engineering  
  • Façade engineering  
  • Fire engineering  
  • IT and communication systems  
  • Smart building systems  
  • Sustainability assessments  
  • LEED, DGNB, BREEAM, WELL  
  • Specialist lighting  

Project highlights


Morpheus

Macau, China 

Part of Macau’s City of Dreams complex, Morpheus is a 150,000m2, 40-storey hotel with 780 guest rooms, luxury suites and villas, retail outlets, restaurants, a casino, spa and sky pool, as well as meeting and event spaces. With the structure being far from a conventional form, the Buro Happold team used finite element (FE) analysis to determine the structural accuracy of the links needed to achieve the complex geometry. Our team created a bespoke programmatic approach, enabling us to process the huge number of FE models required and, critically, the corresponding 3D visualisations of every connection. We applied our expertise in facade and structural design to realise this phenomenal tower, rooting pioneering techniques within our tested methodology to shape a new future in hotel design. 

Radisson SAS Iveria Hotel

Radisson SAS Iveria Hotel 

Tblisi, Georgia 

Part of our brief for this project was to maximise space and clear storey height to add value. But the residents of Tblisi also wanted the building preserved as it is considered an important symbol of Georgian history. It was built in the 1960 and at one point housed up to 800 refugees in the 1990s. By strengthening the structure to bring it up to international standards we saved the Iveria Hotel from demolition – saving planning, demolition and rebuilding costs. Our expert local teams, with support from our international offices, provided the necessary insight to retain this iconic symbol of Georgian culture and history.