On the sidelines of CES in Las Vegas, Ceasars Entertainment partnered up with WeChat to give tours of new smart hotel rooms at The LINQ, a local hotel and casino. Visitors could use an app inside WeChat to control lighting, thermostats, and curtains.
The connected suites will be the first of many such hotel rooms from Ceasars catering to overseas Chinese. After arriving at the room, they just need to scan a QR code to get the app. The app, which operates as a WeChat official account, was developed by Silicon Valley-based Ayla Networks.
"For the LINQ suite the devices are controlled through WeChat exclusively, but Ayla-powered devices can basically be controlled by any app via any home hub that runs on Zigbee, Z-wave or Wi-Fi," says Sharon Chan, a public relations representative speaking on behalf of the project.
In 2013, 300,000 visitors from Hong Kong and China travelled to Las Vegas, nearly doubling in the last two years. Ceasars said in a statement:
Collaborating with leading companies like Ayla and WeChat helps make our customers feel even more at home when they can interact in our resorts using technology and apps like WeChat that they use daily.
Ceasars operates 50 casinos across the US and four other countries.
The collaboration with Ceasars is one of many projects WeChat is using to study foreign markets outside of China for new opportunities. "We aim to build up an ecosystem for merchants to leverage on WeChat to implement O2O strategies and projects. The Casears hotel project is one of partners we are working with," Tencent spokesperson Limin Chen said. "Other projects that connect WeChat to the offline world include Easy Taxi official account implementation in Asia, Zalora project in Asia, and YOOX shopping accounts in the US, Italy, and China."
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