Wynn Las Vegas Adding Alexa Next Summer

Amazon Echo to be placed in every room of the posh Sin City hotel, in perhaps most revolutionary crossover of residential and commercial technology since iPad proliferation.

“Alexa, should I split these 8s?”

You won’t quite be able to ask THAT question when the Wynn Las Vegas adds Amazon Echo to all 4,748 rooms next summer, but you should be able to close the curtains, dim the lights and other simple tasks by talking to your temporary voice-activated hotel roommate.

Guests will be able to control lights, room temperature, drapery and the television, Wynn said in a statement, though more features may be added in the future. It’s not clear that guests will be able to buy anything from Amazon with Alexa at the Wynn, though.

Based on his glowing words about Echo, you have to wonder if AV Nation Tim Albright will be among the first guests when Alexa makes her Las Vegas Strip debut. Having Amazon Echo in all guests rooms is aimed at giving guests basic information about their rooms and the hotel without having to call the front desk.

A New Kind of Butler

“I have never, ever seen anything that was more intuitively dead-on to making the guest experience seamlessly delicious, effortlessly convenient, with the ability to talk to your room and say: ‘Alexa, I am here, open the curtains, lower the temperature, turn on the news,'” says Wynn Resorts founder Steve Wynn in a Geekwire article. “She becomes our butler at the service at each of our guests.”

“I have ever seen anything in my 49 years of developing resorts that has made our job of delivering a perfect experience to our guests easier and help us get to another level, it is Alexa.”
Wynn Resorts founder Steve Wynn

Wynn told Geekwire technology has always played an important part in his resorts, but he’s never quite seen anything like Alexa.

“The thing that Amazon has done with Alexa is quite perfect,” said Wynn in a press release announcing the Wynn-Amazon deal. “I have ever seen anything in my 49 years of developing resorts that has made our job of delivering a perfect experience to our guests easier and help us get to another level, it is Alexa.

“The ability to talk to your room is effortlessly convenient. In partnership with Amazon, becoming the first resort in the world in which guests can verbally control every aspect of lighting, temperature and the audio-visual components of a hotel room is yet another example of our leadership in the world of technology for the benefit of all of our guests,” he said.

While the idea of a listening device in your Vegas hotel room may seem startling for some guests, what happens in Vegas should hopefully still stay in Vegas, according to CNBC. Guests can hit the mute button on the Echo. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has said the mute button used on devices like the Echo is harder to hack than a smartphone.

Here’s more from Steve Wynn talking about the importance of technology:

 

If you enjoyed this article and want to receive more valuable industry content like this, click here to sign up for our digital newsletters!