Technology

Post-crises, only those hoteliers will succeed who a) understand that we are dealing with exceedingly tech-savvy customers who are even more tech-demanding compared to just a year ago - the pandemic has accelerated digital transformation by as much as 7 years (McKinsey), and b) invest in technology to ensure contactless guest experience and improve operational efficiencies via automation, AI, IoT and robotization to lower labor costs, now consuming as much as 87% of RevPAR (CBRE).

Adding digital interaction guests should continue to come more and more to the forefront for hotels, as that is what guests want. Guest, like any other human being, like to be in control. With their phone, they can. A simple innovation is converting the offerings of an early arrival and late departures from often complimentary last-minute front desk discussions to pre-arrival digital offerings.

I am of the view that a significant technology shift is on the cusp of the broader hospitality industry. The catalyst, as Martin points out, is the customer/guest and the world that they are living in. The further we progress the overall hospitality experience, in a digital sense it will become an extension of the guests' life as compared to a step away from their existing lives.

AR is present in different areas of our life today, even on its most trivial aspects: think about the explosion of Pokémon Go, a game with over 60M active users every month. Some hotels have ridden this "gamification" wave, transforming into "Pokétel." AR is also used to offer unique experiences, as in the case of "Le Petit Chef," an application created by SkullMapping, which lets you enjoy your dinner while it is "cooked" by an animated Chef on your plate.

In the wake of new technology adoption due to COVID we are at the perfect place for adoption of Augmented reality. New guest experiences can be created and new revenue streams become available with this technology. Marketing and entertainment spring to mind as great starting points, tours and navigation as well as these have been tried and tested already and of course F&B could really leverage on this technology.

The pandemic propels the hospitality industry to innovate and offer new and exciting ways for guests' experience. As the industry seeks to upsell, enhance their guest experience and service offerings to stimulate demands, AR becomes an extremely valuable hotel technology during this recovery period.

In short, yes, but the problem hotels will have is the quality of the data and getting it into a repository in a meaningful, normalized, standardized way. Many legacy hotel systems are hell-bent on not allowing hotel staff to get at their own data, at least not at a reasonable cost.

Before data scientists can to their job properly we need to find structured ways of collecting and consolidating our data. It's true that we have a lot of data floating around our industry but it still sits in many different places and even the ownership of the data is unclear.

Data scientists or “Data whisperers” will be a key part of successful hotels in the future. Data-driven decisions will become the norm and gut feeling and the “we have always done it that way” will disappear. As we are getting better with technology and the acceleration of adoption has happened because of COVID-19, we must start utilizing the data that is available to us both internally and also externally.

My top 5: 1). Session specific: As these will be online, make the sessions very specific. So not “what will be the future of hotel wireless infrastructure” but “what will WIFI 6 mean for your hotel guests and the three things you need to know”.

Thanks HFTP for virtualizing this year's edition of HITEC! It would have been very hard, especially for non-US based hoteliers to join this year for obvious reasons. What I have enjoyed most at HITECs in the past was the opportunity to network, catch up with old friends, and make new connections (remember the HotSOS parties?).

In my view, the trickiest part of Cyber HITEC will be the organization and online presentation of the trade show. Keynote speeches, sessions, workshops, and seminars can easily be organized via online conferencing technology like Zoom.

I believe there are three immediate action steps hoteliers, especially independents, can implement in a relatively fast and inexpensive fashion: 1. Develop a “Here is how we make your stay with us safer than ever” program with sanitation and safety protocols at the property, including: Infrared fever detection for each guest arrival (devices on Amazon start at $299)Contactless guest servicing technology applications such as mobile-check-in and virtual concierge as well as mobile assistants in the guest rooms, etc.

First and foremost, building trust is the most imperative factor to get your guests in the rooms. Physical sanitation of rooms and common spaces on a regular basis should be made routine. SOP's need to be designed around room dining and buffet break fasts can be replaced by in-room service.

The main things that could or should be done are. 1: guest communication platforms, either a Whats App for business or a dedicated platform, guest's communication should be digital and remove the need to go to the reception or concierge.

I am a firm believer that hoteliers should stay focused on their core competencies to prosper in today's complex, hyper-dynamic environment. Unfortunately, technology is not and has never been one of hotelier's core competencies.

To develop your own solutions, a big and expensive team of specialists is required. A typical software development cycle has project managers, product managers, developers, testers, security specialists, DBAs, and functional and technical analysts involved, amongst others.

Life long tech investments and systems are a thing of the past. The average age of any new technology is five years. Today technology disrupts verticals and human behavior. The total cost of owning technology has come down considerably with mobile and cloud solutions.

1) No the one stop shop is not already here. Some vendors do cover multiple products but there is no all in one. 2) The biggest barriers for vendors has been geographical presence and legal / compliance per country, language and support.

When we worked with retail, education, theme parks and licensing businesses we needed a handful of systems to manage all their business processes. ERP, CRM, POS and much more is done on a single platform. In hotels not so much...

The hospitality industry has a “tech vendor deficit disorder” in the sense of being overwhelmed by the number of tech vendors and solutions out there. The existing fragmentation of the industry: stakeholders, technology and data, is exacerbated further by the super fragmentation in hotel tech vendors.

I have two big frustrations: 1) In the Booking Phase: dealing with mobile-last Hotel websites that take forever to download on mobile devices. Wake up, hoteliers, visitors to your websites quit if your website pages and booking screens are not downloading within 2.5 seconds!

Whilst you may have viewed my HITEC video regarding my frustrations with tech when staying in a Hotel – let me add my two cents regarding booking a Hotel. In many cases, I find the booking process to be just too cumbersome and does not always follow a natural sequence – such as location, dates (in/out), number of people, type of room etc.

I don't believe that this is about Billions of dollars or even percentages of revenue. It's about a willingness to change, and unfortunately we are not very good at that. In our industry innovation or R&D does not have to be very technical and therefore does not have to be done by specialists.

Lots of us think that there is not enough investment in innovation in the hospitality industry. I disagree - at least as it relates to the investment by chains. When you include technology refurbishment and renewal, it is the independent properties and to a lesser extent the loosely managed brands such as Best Western individual member properties that fall behind.

Digitization means democratization. Today it is not the budget that decides but the competence of the management about success and failure. Hotels should invest first and foremost in the quality of management, in their continuous education and training.

Even though still in the Buzz word stage, AI will play a massive role in our industry. Most will state that it will be a customer facing technology. From concierge robots who can interact with guests to chatbots and messaging.

Revenue management systems (RMS) were once amongst the hottest technologies in our industry. Unfortunately, we have not made much progress beyond hurdle rates, last room availability and length of stay powered by basic algorithms that haven't changed much.

Artificial Intelligence is not new to the hospitality industry in the specifics of narrow intelligence. The industry has long had technology capable of providing decision support or executive information around specific and targeted sets of consolidated information.

Does anyone remember the NCR 4200. Used as the front desk and night audit posting machine? That dinosaur was replaced by what we thoughtlessly named the “PMS” (which would have been better named 'PMIS” for “information system.”) Well, it is about 46 years later and things surely have changed.

There will always be a system that is at 'the heart' of a hotel, whether we call it PMS, CRS, CRM, CRPMS or something else with a C or a P in it... We need a place where we can store inventory, rates and customers. Our problem today is that we don't have a single platform.

Hotels need to get back control of the data on their businesses and especially on their guest. the latter can be enabled by "service bus technology". Adding onto this the approach of working with SAAS platforms this starts to become possible.

The hospitality industry is definitely lagging behind other industries when it comes to technology. The check-in and check-out process for example has not fundamentally changed since, well ... ever ... In my opinion there are three main reasons (or should we say excuses?) for this, as well as many smaller ones.

A big part of this issue is due to the fragmented stakeholder situation in our industry. There is a) the brand (Franchisor) and their priorities to push the brand distribution and franchise fees. b) the management company that aims to maximize revenue and profit (as it will in most cases increase their income of management fees); and c) the owner or asset manager of the hotel who's priority is to maximize the EXIT value of the property.All these stakeholders compete for the available investments (FF&E) funds.

This is a two sided problem. Hoteliers are not investing enough into technology and will keep using it till it breaks or stops working. There are no or limited return on investment calculations that are used. Investment in technology is also too low and does not receive the priority that it should.