Thriving with technology
TECHNOLOGY HAS, needless to say, significantly changed the pace of today’s businesses. In the hotel industry, those that wield technology- driven strategies do so to stay competitive and satiate guests’ ever-growing needs for a customized experience.
Professional services firm Accenture Consulting, in its paper titled “Getting Personal with Digital: Mastering the digital revolution in the lodging industry,” said the new trends in hospitality technology enable players to better manage their operations, maximize their overall performance, as well as achieve improved approaches in sales and marketing.
“Technology is the key to managing a guest’s experience at all stages of a visit — from the moment that a guest plans a trip to when they check in, are on property, check out, and even after they have walked out the door,” the paper said.
Forward-thinking hoteliers, it noted, have three key areas in which their IT strategies should be further developed — analytics, mobility, and touchpoint channels.
“Building an advanced analytics capability is not easy, but now is the time to move beyond one- off initiatives and build a foundation of adaptive technology that enables better informed decision making and refined explanations for business performance. An advanced decision-making capability will drive greater understanding of customers and markets, resulting in more innovative products, better customer targeting, improved pricing and superior growth in revenue and profits,” it said.
It emphasized the need for hotel businesses to keep up with the advances in mobility the so- called “now consumers,” which it described as “highly mobile, always-connected,” employ. “Lodging companies will need to address mobility holistically to determine ways to effectively integrate both guest and employee demands into their enterprise and property IT architectures and to manage them across the guest life cycle.”
It added that hotels’ existing digital channels must be optimized so as to maintain relevance among guests while building brand loyalty and gaining revenue. “What is needed is to [embrace] contemporary marketing and transforming the function into a discipline centered on meeting guest needs. Orchestrat- ing it all will require harnessing the skills of the organization’s IT innovators and savvy marketing visionaries,” the paper said.
Hotel companies, for their part, are increasingly becoming aware of how vital technology is to their growth.
According to the “2016 Lodging Technology Study” released by Hospitality Technology, a multimedia source of technology-related information exclusively for hotel and restaurant operators, 54% of hotel respondents said they had plans to invest more in technology last year compared to the previous years. However, 41% said they would spend about the same amount and 5% would spend less.
Technology spending would be focused on payment and data security (62%), guest room technology upgrades (56%), increasing bandwidth (45%), leveraging mobile engagement for customer-facing applications (43%), digital strategy development (32%), migration of solutions to the cloud (31%), and leveraging mobile engagement for employee-facing applications (29%), the study found.
“If there’s a single technology trend for hotels in 2016, it’s more. More bandwidth, more data, more mobile engagement, more personalization, more secure transactions and more spend. Hotels are in a race to not just provide technology, but especially to enable it,” Hospitality Technology Magazine group editor-in-chief Abigail A. Lorden and associate professor at UNLV Hotel College Mehmet Erdem said in the study’s introduction.