Technology

The most obvious ones are Pricing and Forecasting - and hopefully most of the vendors out there already have some or a lot of that built in. One that hasn't been solved yet and which is most "on-brand" for a hotel is guest personalization.

AI in Hospitality is not some futuristic, Spielberg-esque technology or a nice PR opportunity to make your hotel company look cool, but a real-life, much needed technology that can help your hotel a) solve concrete issues plaguing the hospitality industry such as labor shortages and out-of-control labor costs, b) improve efficiencies and productivity, c) automate pricing and business decision making, and d) respond to the exceedingly high expectations of your exceedingly tech-savvy guestsSome of the temporary measures to tackle the current pressing issues employed by hoteliers include changes in the business model, outsourcing or hiring more gig workers to do the job and streamlining operations.

AI does and will have a place in hospitality. For far too long we have relied on old fashioned manual processes and adore spending hours in Excel sheets and copy paste information. We know that system integration issues have been behind this but with the modern open API platforms removing this barrier there is no reason why AI should not have a more prominent place in our industry.

Innovation and transformation are taking place at a rapid pace all around us. Technology allowing for a true digital revolution, environmental and social being the middle point of attention and the covid pandemic making us all aware of what quality time and life are all about.How does our industry respond to these new demands, especially as so many are just trying to stay afloat given the financial impact of 18 months of economic downturn?

Start-ups ignite transformation. Any industry that is either embryonic or in dire need of change has to deconstruct and regenerate in a more coherent, dynamic form. This is what happened to the food industry in many countries and to the many industries pre the advent of technology.

It's all about beliefs, culture, and behavior. Companies must have a purpose—and that purpose must be authentic, inspiring, actionable, and consistently shared across the entire organization. It's important to understand (and celebrate!) the power of diversity versus the challenges of sameness.

Let's begin with arguing that the word "contactless". When a guest us using their mobile phone or a self service check in our out, there is still contact, there is still service that can be provided, and if the hotel does it well their is still staff member around to assist if needed.

The contactless guest journey is here to stay. The hospitality industry will not be going back to the old times of 100% human-assisted guest journey. Why? To begin with, the current labor shortage is not going away anytime soon.

Personally, I don't associate the contactless tech experience with COVID. I associate it with the rise of mobile technology in general and the intersection of customers of any industry wanting more control and the commercial opportunity of giving them control, thus offloading processes and effort.

I believe there is a 2 part solution here, one that cost money and one that saves money, putting them together will overall increase margin and service effectiveness. The first one is increase wages to make the hotel industry more competitive in the labor market.

Due to the rapid travel rebound, today hotels and restaurants alike are offering sign-up bonuses (Marriott is offering $1,000!), higher wages way above $15/hour, and even cash payments to candidates just to come for an interview.

When demand for accommodation is greater than supply generally a higher rate is charged for a room. This is sustainable apparently. When the demand for skilled hospitality labour is greater than supply, higher rates of pay to attract talent in a traditionally underpaid industry is unsustainable?

I fully agree with your students. We still need 50+ applications to run a single business unit (hotel) and it's not even that complicated at least for most of it. Why are there PMSs that can't send an HTML confirmation or do an online check-in?

The idea of "one-stop-shop", a product that does everything, is a flawed one. It looks promising in theory but never works in practice, because no one can do everything well, and therefore companies specialize in specific areas, and clients eventually buy "best-in-class" from different providers.

WhatsApp and the likes are B2C apps, so to make the comparison fair hotel software should be compared with the likes of Salesforce, Workday or Hubspot, all applications that today are fairly easy to activate, but to maximize their potentials, they suggest/require some training and implementation effort.