Technology

There are 2 major adoption hurdles for the Metaverse: hardware & interoperability. 1- Hardware: most Metaverses that run on crypto (Decentraland, Sandbox, etc) require a powerful computer, that barely anyone has or can afford.

In the metaverse, we are only bound by our creativity and the resources at our disposal. Because it is digital, anything can be created as long as we set our minds to it. After all, in the digital world, the laws of physics do not apply, even if we interact with the physical world.

I think the answer is the same to the question : "An open internet for an open, decentralized industry" and Web3 is trying to address it. So, rather than looking for a metaverse specific reply, we should treat the problem as a common one (i.e.

The greater opportunity lies not in what to sell, but in how to sell it. Whether we like it or not, there are some best-sellers that travelers prefer and that generate significant revenue and margin for hotels. It's quite hard to come up with new product ideas, but it's quite straightforward to design a better way of showcasing the products hotels already have.

I'm forever surprised by hoteliers who seem to consider that the room booking is the culmination of the guest sales journey, and not, as it should be, the start! The honeymoon period for upselling is at the time of booking, so why not employ tools that are easily accessed by QR codes to advertise hotel amenities and services to help boost spend per customer?

We interviewed a General Manager of one of our resort hotel customers recently. I thought he made an interesting comment "I am not in the business to sell a flower or chocolate deal!, yes it may delight the guest, but it's not really helping my bottomline, given the logistics involved to get it actually all to the guest".

The concept of the "Metaverse" has existed since the 80s, and Full Fledged Metaverses like 'The Sandbox' and 'Decentraland' have been there since 2012 and 2017 alongside Axie Infinity (2018) and of course the oldest mainstream name amongst the bunch Roblox which officially launched in 2006.

Gartner states that emerging technologies for 2022 fall under three main themes: 1) evolution/expansion of immersive experiences, 2) accelerated automation of artificial intelligence, and 3) optimisation of technology delivery.

I think various fields have been doing a lot of research for years in AR/VR, and the idea of the Metaverse gives them a great mass adoption use case. There is also the gaming industry that has been creating virtual worlds for ages, Habbo Hotel is happy to say they were the first Metaverse, and any video game could say the same.

As a general rule the adoption of automation is intended to improve the status quo in any area of a business. Simplified, to be able to do things at the 'speed of data' as compared to the speed of people. Therefore, the best application for automation in our industry is in any place that technology has reached a stage where it can augment or supersede the capability of standing manual processes.

I believe by automation in hospitality, we have to understand and include all of the technology applications and devices that are augmenting and replacing human-provided services: mobility, contactless experience, AI, robotics, etc.

Automation will be the No. 1 focus for owners and operators moving forward as they look to reduce labor costs and meet new guest expectations. The self-service movement has taken off in other traveler verticals, such as air travel and ground transportation, and hoteliers will be best served by relying on digital tools to allow guests to perform many functions on their own devices, such as check-in, in-room dining, lobby purchases, etc.

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.

Whilst I completely agree with the description of the problem, I take issue with the solutions offered by the author as being both simplistic and incomplete. TigerTMS (I feel I may refer to my company as the author has referenced several others) has been developing interface software for over 40 years - thousands of hotel properties worldwide use our software because it provides the middleware between disparate applications.

I think they will help accelerate the industry forward on the short term, solving the issues of legacy providers. As hoteliers upgrade their technology stack to more modern solutions that have well built integration layers, the hubs might loose some of their importance.

There are over 5,000 hotel tech vendors around the world working around the clock to develop new and innovative solutions to common problems or applications to elevate service delivery in hotel operations, guest communications, revenue management, marketing, etc.

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.