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?

George Roukas
George Roukas
Partner at Hudson Crossing

The demands of today's guests, as well as those of the future, will require that brands finally stop their largely empty talk about the ability to identify their best customers and create personalized hotel experiences for them. While personalization has been a huge buzzword for hotels, precious little of it has escaped into the wild where guests can actually perceive it. Millennials and their younger counterparts are demanding more, and hotel brands will now have to dig deep to identify their guests, collect and thread their interaction history and communications (from multiple channels,) and create differentiated offerings for them...or invite losing them to other brands who are ready to do so.

Collecting all of that guest history and profile data will require bringing data from today's disparate sources, like PMS and CRS, together into a repository that makes it available to CRM and RMS systems that can craft those personalized offerings. The newer class of converged CRS/PMS systems are a great first step in bringing the data together. When a brand (or chain) brings together all of my profile data, my clickstream data, my stay data, etc. it can not only put together custom bundles for me with high likelihood of purchase, it may also be able to rid me of being annoyingly asked at a property where I've stayed dozens of times: “have you stayed with us before?”

How would hotels get there? Signing up with a vendor who has demonstrated a viable, converged CRS/PMS is a good start, but brands need to also consider what the vendors actually have (which is in various stages of development) and where they are going. Converged systems are the start of a longer journey toward converged, multi-application (but single-vendor) platforms and, further on, ecosystems of multiple vendors and applications. Granted, multi-vendor ecosystems are a ways off, but if you're on the first step of one of those journeys-of-a-thousand-steps, isn't it wise to figure out where that 1000th step is going to land you? As Lewis Carroll said: “If you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there.” 

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