How Digital Transformation and Embedded Hospitality Will Become a Remarkable new Game Changer

We live in a time where hotels every day have to look at alternative solutions to take on new challenges.

Many of these challenges bring on new opportunities that have forced many hotels to think outside the box to create new experience offers for customers.

At the same time hotels also had to look at new ways to work with the human resources they have, and attract new talents.

Many hotels are now starting to learn the benefits of collaborating on co-design, co-creation, co-working, co-production, co-marketing, co-distribution, and co-funding.

Embedded hospitality is a new way to work with the community to bundle alternative services in an integrated manner.

Digital transformation focuses on people and technology working in harmony that will allow your hotel to put a mark on every experience.

Ready to learn more… Let’s dive in…

How Digital Transformation and Embedded Hospitality Will Become a Remarkable new Game Changer

It is time for hotels to take a new approach and start creating a new culture.

Today no hotel can afford to isolate itself and keep on with business as usual. Embedded hospitality responds to a growing need for hotels to articulate new beliefs and systems that are aligned with shifts in the global economy and how every touchpoint in the customer experience matters.

Customers today want hotels to work with them. They are inviting your hotel into their community, make sure you take advantage of this.

Hotels now have to collaborate with customers to get a better understanding of the small things that matter within their experience. Hotels need to understand how the customer perceives the small things that will make a difference in their total experience.

Collaboration is essential for embedded hospitality to get a better understanding of the customer’s feelings in context with the small things.

Working with employees, customers and the community on co-design, co-creation, co-working, co-production, co-marketing, co-distribution, and co-funding will help your hotel gain new valuable insight.

And then create a system that generates leaps in value for everyone and allows your hotel to tap into new uncontested markets.

Digital Transformation key hurdles

We want to create a system for hotels where people and technology work in harmony.

And when we introduce digital transformation and embedded hospitality four key hurdles need to understand.

1. Cognitive hurdle: The mental blocks that exist toward recognizing that there is a need for change. Numbers typically are too abstract for employees. Employees have to experience situations where they can see and understand the hotel's worst operational problems in the context of the most disgruntled customers. This will help them see the need for change themselves.
2. Resource hurdle: Related to beliefs about implementing change with limited resources and time. And with this mindset, there is a belief that the greater the change greater the resources and time needed to execute it.
3. Motivational hurdle: Lies in motivating people in executing a new strategy. Breakthrough strategies often fail due to people failing to execute them properly. Here we focus on three disproportionate factors influencing employees. First, identify the kingpins which are key influencers within the hotel organization that can unlock or block any access to key resources. And then focus on fishbowl management where activities by key influencers are made transparent for all to see. This requires transparency, inclusion, and a fair process. And then implement atomization where you break down the execution of the digital transformation in step-by-step bite-size atoms that employees at each level of the hotel organization can relate to and feel responsible for.
4. Political hurdle: The strong political forces that arise to block the execution of a new strategy. Even the wisest decisions can be knocked dead by the strong, intangible political forces that exist within any hotel. Here you have to identify three types of people. Angels are those within a hotel organization who have the most to gain from the execution of a new strategy. You want to collaborate with them as early as possible in the transformation process. Devils are those that likely will fight the execution of the transformation process. The consigliere is a politically adept and highly respected insider who can help identify landmines that may lie ahead in executing the transformation. They also will help you identify Angels and Devils in the hotel organization.

Creating Embedded Hospitality for your Hotel

As your get an overview of the four key hurdles of digital transformation you will get a good perspective of the social resilience that is existent.

Now you can start creating a system for implementing embedded hospitality for your hotel.

In this process, we start with creating a pioneer-migrator-settler map.

It all starts with understanding what you have and where your hotel stand.

The majority of hotels today are settlers (value imitation). Their strategy converges with the rest of the hotel industry. They are competing within the current market – service market. And the primary commodity they compete on is typically price.

Migrators (value improvement) are hotels that offer improved value over the competition. But these offers focus on more for less within expanded commodities like price, amenities, quality, location, etc.

And then we have pioneers (value innovation).
These hotels don’t have customers… they have fans!! And they offer unprecedented value that opens a new value-cost journey. These hotels have created a system that breaks away from the completion and is poised for strong profitable growth.

The majority of hotels today are either settlers or a combination of settlers and migrators. But few are among the pioneers.

Creating a system for Embedded Hospitality

Becoming a pioneer hotel requires a change in your hotel culture. A settler or migrator hotel is something every hotel can become through the commodities they have to offer.

1. Discover what you have - The first part of your hotel's digital transformation journey starts with learning what you have and becoming more thankful.
2. Build relationships and make friends first - Once you have an understanding of what you have then start with building relationships and making friends first. Start creating a system for our hotel where people and technology work in harmony.
3. Unlock new potential - Start unlocking new potentials helping people with the confidence to act. Creating a system that recognizes people for their intellectual and emotional worth, building trust, and inspiring voluntary cooperation.
4. Working with people - Learn to work with people to achieve tangible results by combining creative competence with the confidence to act.
5. Collaborate - Collaborate with employees, customers, and the community to reduce friction. Create a system that identifies the factors of disproportionate influence on your hotel.
6. Differentiate - Create unprecedented value that opens a new value-cost frontier. Differentiate with a thankful portal with digital thanks. Measure what your hotel gives.

Embedded hospitality includes collaborating on co-design, co-creation, co-working, co-production, co-marketing, co-distribution, and co-funding.

And embedded hospitality aims to be regenerative, aligning with becoming more inclusive, diverse, sustainable, social, and economic context in which your hotel operates, taking into account longer timeframes and a broader understanding of value innovation.

The future of embedded hospitality

The future of embedded hospitality includes new advanced analytics that focuses on flexibility and agility that will help you to stay competitive, provide you with an opportunity for market leadership, and can set your hotel brand apart as an innovator.

Embedded analytics is explicitly designed to help your hotel leverage data-driven insights to make better decisions. Less time is spent on data preparation and more time goes into analysis which can be put to practical use.

The most valuable aspect and use case of embedded analytics is its ability to help your hotel design new business models that monetize the data that you already have, creating new revenue streams.

The key drivers for Embedded Hospitality

Fair Process

Fair process is the point in the digital transformation where you focus on collaboration, community, and building trust.

Building trust and making friends first will inspire your hotel's employees to use their energy and efforts to the best of their abilities to go beyond the call of duty to help you execute the digital transformation framework.

And three activities are put in place to implement Fair Process and start reimagining new possibilities with your employees;

1. Engagement: This is about collaborating and involving employees and customers in new strategic decisions that affect them by soliciting their input and allowing them to refute the merits of one another’s ideas and assumptions. It is key to communicate respect for individuals and their points of view. This will result in more effective decisions and genuine commitment from everyone involved in execution.
2. Explanation: ensure that everyone involved and affected understands why the final strategic decisions are made. An explanation of the rationale supports confidence among all the people involved, and that their ideas and input have been considered. This principle serves as a powerful opportunity to learn and help to learn.
3. Expectation clarity: requires that after the strategy is set the new rules of the game have to be clearly stated. If you started in the spirit of collaboration and partnership with people through the engagement and explanation principles they will take ownership of the new rules of the game. When people clearly understand expectations, political jockeying and favoritism are minimized, and everyone involved can focus on executing the strategy rapidly.

Tipping Point Leadership

Tipping point leadership represents the principles that allow the hotel to overcome the digital transformational hurdles while winning back employees, customers, and the community.

And tipping point leaders have a simultaneous pursuit of differentiation and low cost, creating a leap in value for employees, customers, the community, and the hotel.

To achieve a strategic shift towards low cost and differentiation hotel leaders need to focus on the extremes; the people, acts, and activities that exert a disproportionate influence on performance.

1. People: once the beliefs and energies of a critical mass of people are engaged, conversion to a new idea will spread like an epidemic, bringing about fundamental transformation very quickly.
2. Acts: identifying what factors that hotels compete on should they eliminate and reduce. What factors should hotels raise and create to uplift leadership, employee, and customer value?
3. Activities: identify the activities that exert a disproportionate influence on performance.

Digital Transformation Framework Partnership for Hotels

Hotels today have to invest in people and technology in a context that adds value to everyone involved.

Don’t continue to neglect or take the people's transformation for granted. Technology is a digital tool that will help your hotel when implemented in collaboration with your employees.

Partner with your employees and they will help with retaining and hiring people.

I also invite you to work with me as your hotel partner to help implement a new innovative digital transformation framework that opens the digital gateways to more direct bookings without competing with the OTA.

Through value innovation, I help hotels with cost-effective alternatives that are focused on eliminating and reducing factors the hotel industry competes on. I also help lift employee and customer value by raising and creating elements that hotels never offered before.

Shoot me an email at: [email protected].

Are Morch is a digital transformation coach helping hotels open their digital front door, reimagine their processes and culture, and transform experiences in a fast-paced world!

Are Morch
Digital Transformation Coach
Are Morch, Digital Transformation Coach