The IT Benchmark Report at Property level 2014 - what is the largest IT Spend?

The IT BENCHMARK REPORT is an annual report published by Ecole Hotelière de Lausanne (EHL), on spending on hotel technology at property level in Europe, Africa and Middle East (EAME). This report analyses and interprets the demographic, financial performance and technology data from an independent survey of EAME, property-level hotels. It reports longitudinal data collected annually, at the end of the fiscal year, from 2007 to 2014 of IT HOTEL PROPERTY LEVEL SPEND. It includes, for the first time this year, the biggest IT spend for year ending 2013. The stated levels of IT spending are 'actual' as opposed to projected budgets.

Extracted here are some key data and graphs from this years' report.

The OPEX spend per room has increased to an all-time high 516€ in 2013, with most regions experiencing an increase in operational spending on IT (CHART 1).

The CAPEX is consistent with previous years 2007-2013 at 208€ with EAME - Middle East showing the most significant increase in capital expenditure. (CHART 2)

This is the first year that the data on the largest IT investment is reported. About 70 mid-scale and up-scale hotel properties responded to this particular survey question. In this report the categories are grouped in the following manner; no single item, internet, software, servers, television (TV), Internet, guest facing, maintenance, hardware networks and miscellaneous.

A significant 38.6%, of hotels did not make any large technology investments in 2013. This may be due to the fact that they made major investments in the previous year and therefore not aligned with the cycle of investment. Nonetheless it is important to note that amongst this 38.6% of properties , 11.1%, spent an average of 291,000€ in 2013 on IT, clearly spending across the board.

The most popular technological investments are internet (18.6%), software (11.4%) and server (10.0%) upgrades. 18.6% of hotels spent an average of 101,000€ on both guest facing and general upgrades to their internet provision, which is in line with the increased demand for greater speed and availability of internet services at hotels.

There are few large scale investments in hardware reported in 2013, 4.3%. This may, again, be due to the technology investment, upgrade cycle.

Software-related spending, predominantly by hotels in North-West Europe, tended to include upgrades and installations of management of operational level systems e.g. for parking, point of sales and other operations-related systems.

EAME, North West & Central, Eastern and Mediterranean regions focused on investments related to servers comprised purchasing, upgrading and consolidating servers

The full THE IT BENCHMARK REPORT- 2014 can be downloaded at EHL Publications IT-benchmarking-at-property-level-2014

Hilary Catherine Murphy
Professor of Information Technology & Digital Marketing
+41 21 785 1496
EHL