Technology

It's not a question of whether hoteliers will invest. It's they "Must" invest. The digital customer journey is gaining prominence, and the consumer is looking for a more autonomous experience, more fluid, functional and fast. But it's not only investing in guest-facing technology; back-of-house efficiencies using technology must also take focus.

Will the ongoing challenge of committing financial resources toward technology in hospitality continue? Yes. Today's hospitality industry is a real estate business in many of the significant markets around the world. Technology, as a result, is not the most important facet of the business and when it comes to capital/operational funding allocation, technology competes with all other aspects of business for a fair share of allocation.

It is an understatement to say that the hotel industry has had a tough year in 2022. In my view, hoteliers will not only start investing in technology but take it a notch up as well. Innovative hotel businesses have already gone past the crisis and are focusing on reassuring guests, offering great value, providing a safe environment.

The problem with silos is hardly unique to the hospitality industry. Actually, it's a natural consequence of the speed of evolution and innovation in the technology itself. Hotel tech companies are much faster at building new capabilities than the industry is at learning to work with them.

In the near to mid-term, any full-service 3-4-5-star hotel will need several dozen APIs (application programming interface) with third-party tech applications and solutions to be able to function and meet the basic needs and wants of today's tech-savvy travelers.

Hotels should become PMS-agnostic not tech-agnostic. The future is to have a Central Profile as the key element of the IT strategy and to connect all systems to a platform (keyword: Central Data Management - CDM) who builds and manages the golden record.

The PMS is now just “another” system used by the hotel, just like a POS or CRM or SPA system. The growth of Open API service oriented middleware is the way forward. Layering on top of this customer data platforms is truly the way to go forward and will give many returns to the hotels that can adopt this.

Today and I think for the foreseeable future the PMS remain will remain the center piece of a hotel technology stack, especially for individual hotels. Yes there have been thoughts to make the CRS more central or the CRM, but none of these applications have made any effort to enable connectivity to all on property systems, that tough job is still done by the PMS and the PMS only.

In the hospitality industry the one point of commonality in the product offering is the room. The smallest hotel or inn or BnB at a minimum will have some rooms even where there are no other product offerings. This is the basis for the central nature of a PMS as whether you are an independent stand alone hotel or a massive international brand, everyone has rooms and room types, price, availability and ultimately reservations needs to sit somewhere.

For me, the key is self-serve via automation. Staff turnover will remain high so starters/leavers/movers processes need to be totally automated. Restaurant menu changes and price changes need to be linked end to end to inventory systems.

What are the REALISTIC technology solutions with the greatest impact in 2022? STR just released some troubling data, clearly showing that IT spending in U.S. hospitality during the pandemic shrank significantly compared to 2019, dropping to as low as 50% in 2020 and rebounding slightly to 70% in 2021 of the pre-pandemic level.

While Customer Relationship Manaagement technology has existed in the hotel space for a few decades, today's tools are no longer sufficient in centralizing, de-duping, normalizing and serving the data up in real time to all the necessary systems that need it.