Technology

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.

Innovation and transformation are taking place at a rapid pace all around us. Technology allowing for a true digital revolution, environmental and social being the middle point of attention and the covid pandemic making us all aware of what quality time and life are all about.How does our industry respond to these new demands, especially as so many are just trying to stay afloat given the financial impact of 18 months of economic downturn?

Start-ups ignite transformation. Any industry that is either embryonic or in dire need of change has to deconstruct and regenerate in a more coherent, dynamic form. This is what happened to the food industry in many countries and to the many industries pre the advent of technology.

It's all about beliefs, culture, and behavior. Companies must have a purpose—and that purpose must be authentic, inspiring, actionable, and consistently shared across the entire organization. It's important to understand (and celebrate!) the power of diversity versus the challenges of sameness.

Let's begin with arguing that the word "contactless". When a guest us using their mobile phone or a self service check in our out, there is still contact, there is still service that can be provided, and if the hotel does it well their is still staff member around to assist if needed.

The contactless guest journey is here to stay. The hospitality industry will not be going back to the old times of 100% human-assisted guest journey. Why? To begin with, the current labor shortage is not going away anytime soon.

Personally, I don't associate the contactless tech experience with COVID. I associate it with the rise of mobile technology in general and the intersection of customers of any industry wanting more control and the commercial opportunity of giving them control, thus offloading processes and effort.

I believe there is a 2 part solution here, one that cost money and one that saves money, putting them together will overall increase margin and service effectiveness. The first one is increase wages to make the hotel industry more competitive in the labor market.

Due to the rapid travel rebound, today hotels and restaurants alike are offering sign-up bonuses (Marriott is offering $1,000!), higher wages way above $15/hour, and even cash payments to candidates just to come for an interview.

When demand for accommodation is greater than supply generally a higher rate is charged for a room. This is sustainable apparently. When the demand for skilled hospitality labour is greater than supply, higher rates of pay to attract talent in a traditionally underpaid industry is unsustainable?

I fully agree with your students. We still need 50+ applications to run a single business unit (hotel) and it's not even that complicated at least for most of it. Why are there PMSs that can't send an HTML confirmation or do an online check-in?

The idea of "one-stop-shop", a product that does everything, is a flawed one. It looks promising in theory but never works in practice, because no one can do everything well, and therefore companies specialize in specific areas, and clients eventually buy "best-in-class" from different providers.

WhatsApp and the likes are B2C apps, so to make the comparison fair hotel software should be compared with the likes of Salesforce, Workday or Hubspot, all applications that today are fairly easy to activate, but to maximize their potentials, they suggest/require some training and implementation effort.

I personally think robots is a far stretch for hotels. I do however think that automation and self service will make its move into Hotels at a faster pace than previously, for 2 reasons: First, it's what guest want. You can do anything on a phone, so why not check in to your hotel room, buy an upgrade or order room service, the guest "becomes it's own robot" so to speak, tasks done previously by hotel staff are now done by the guest.

Whether we like it or not, hospitality is fast becoming a tech industry now. Robotics, AI, mobility, IoT devices and contactless check-in tech are being adopted across the industry at a very fast clip. The digital transformation is already changing the industry and the current crisis have accelerated it by 7 years (McKinsey & Company).

Robots No!, No!, No! so no R2D2 coming soon in a hotel. But automation yes as a first step. Hospitality is ripe for RPA and many benefits can be taken from that. Maybe one day physical robots will in hotels but positioning this as a labour cost reduction option and really seeing this wrongly.

Post-crises, only those hoteliers will succeed who a) understand that we are dealing with exceedingly tech-savvy customers who are even more tech-demanding compared to just a year ago - the pandemic has accelerated digital transformation by as much as 7 years (McKinsey), and b) invest in technology to ensure contactless guest experience and improve operational efficiencies via automation, AI, IoT and robotization to lower labor costs, now consuming as much as 87% of RevPAR (CBRE).

Adding digital interaction guests should continue to come more and more to the forefront for hotels, as that is what guests want. Guest, like any other human being, like to be in control. With their phone, they can. A simple innovation is converting the offerings of an early arrival and late departures from often complimentary last-minute front desk discussions to pre-arrival digital offerings.

I am of the view that a significant technology shift is on the cusp of the broader hospitality industry. The catalyst, as Martin points out, is the customer/guest and the world that they are living in. The further we progress the overall hospitality experience, in a digital sense it will become an extension of the guests' life as compared to a step away from their existing lives.

AR is present in different areas of our life today, even on its most trivial aspects: think about the explosion of Pokémon Go, a game with over 60M active users every month. Some hotels have ridden this "gamification" wave, transforming into "Pokétel." AR is also used to offer unique experiences, as in the case of "Le Petit Chef," an application created by SkullMapping, which lets you enjoy your dinner while it is "cooked" by an animated Chef on your plate.

In the wake of new technology adoption due to COVID we are at the perfect place for adoption of Augmented reality. New guest experiences can be created and new revenue streams become available with this technology. Marketing and entertainment spring to mind as great starting points, tours and navigation as well as these have been tried and tested already and of course F&B could really leverage on this technology.

The pandemic propels the hospitality industry to innovate and offer new and exciting ways for guests' experience. As the industry seeks to upsell, enhance their guest experience and service offerings to stimulate demands, AR becomes an extremely valuable hotel technology during this recovery period.

In short, yes, but the problem hotels will have is the quality of the data and getting it into a repository in a meaningful, normalized, standardized way. Many legacy hotel systems are hell-bent on not allowing hotel staff to get at their own data, at least not at a reasonable cost.

Before data scientists can to their job properly we need to find structured ways of collecting and consolidating our data. It's true that we have a lot of data floating around our industry but it still sits in many different places and even the ownership of the data is unclear.

Data scientists or “Data whisperers” will be a key part of successful hotels in the future. Data-driven decisions will become the norm and gut feeling and the “we have always done it that way” will disappear. As we are getting better with technology and the acceleration of adoption has happened because of COVID-19, we must start utilizing the data that is available to us both internally and also externally.

My top 5: 1). Session specific: As these will be online, make the sessions very specific. So not “what will be the future of hotel wireless infrastructure” but “what will WIFI 6 mean for your hotel guests and the three things you need to know”.

Thanks HFTP for virtualizing this year's edition of HITEC! It would have been very hard, especially for non-US based hoteliers to join this year for obvious reasons. What I have enjoyed most at HITECs in the past was the opportunity to network, catch up with old friends, and make new connections (remember the HotSOS parties?).

In my view, the trickiest part of Cyber HITEC will be the organization and online presentation of the trade show. Keynote speeches, sessions, workshops, and seminars can easily be organized via online conferencing technology like Zoom.

I believe there are three immediate action steps hoteliers, especially independents, can implement in a relatively fast and inexpensive fashion: 1. Develop a “Here is how we make your stay with us safer than ever” program with sanitation and safety protocols at the property, including: Infrared fever detection for each guest arrival (devices on Amazon start at $299)Contactless guest servicing technology applications such as mobile-check-in and virtual concierge as well as mobile assistants in the guest rooms, etc.

First and foremost, building trust is the most imperative factor to get your guests in the rooms. Physical sanitation of rooms and common spaces on a regular basis should be made routine. SOP's need to be designed around room dining and buffet break fasts can be replaced by in-room service.

The main things that could or should be done are. 1: guest communication platforms, either a Whats App for business or a dedicated platform, guest's communication should be digital and remove the need to go to the reception or concierge.