The PMS' role as the center of a hotel's technology ecosystem is coming to an end. Crucial guest data sits locked up in today's disconnected data silos, making it very difficult for hotels/brands to optimize and bank in on the 'digital guest journey'. True? If so, how could a future application/data infrastructure or migration path look like? What's your take?

Timo Kettern
Timo Kettern
Director Technical Field Services Openings EMEA, Hilton

The biggest obstacle I see in achieving a data-driven 'digital guest journey', are the legacy PMS's that are widely used in our industry; they might be 'legacy', but they are very deeply interfaced with all the other on- and above property systems we all use. These integrations pose the biggest challenge to migrate to a more open and data-centric Hotel IT Ecosystems.

In my opinion the currently most feasible approach is to off-load the direct-to-PMS interfaces to a business-bus-logic (or middle-ware) and thus becoming independent from the direct-to-PMS Interfaces.

Once all your hotel core systems (like CRS, PMS, RMS, etc) interface with that business-bus-logic (rather than direct to the PMS) it is a lot easier for us hoteliers to migrate to the new generation data-centric applications we need to facilitate the 'digital guest journey'.

The challenge once again will be to convince all our stakeholders that these technology investments are necessary and will deliver an acceptable ROI.

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