Technology continues to become more and more important in the hotel industry. For consumers, technology means an easy life and their appetite for this lifestyle is insatiable. For hotels, technology can help meet the challenge of growing customer expectations and enable them to drive their business objectives better. However, technology is advancing all the time and is constantly unlocking new opportunities aimed at improving customer satisfaction and boosting internal efficiency. It’s a challenge for the hoteliers to keep up with each new development and innovation.
So, how can you tell if your technology is up to scratch and built to stand the test of time, or if you need to swap out and consider investing in newer technology? Get yourself a technology action plan and include the following;
Defining your business objectives: A good place to start is to clearly define your business objectives with regards to new technology or change of systems. So, whether it is a specific revenue goal, increase in market share, improving loyalty figures, having a clear image of what you want to achieve will allow you to put every action and decision with regards to your technology into perspective to focus only on achieving your final objective.
Assesses where your operations are struggling: Operating a hotel is an increasingly complicated field. A full-service hotel operation has multiple systems in place, with mostly propriety integration and connections, along with mass accumulations of both of business and customer intelligence data. While they are many different systems to evaluate, each with its own particular strengths and weaknesses in relation to your hotel, hoteliers should review their technology with the following in mind;
- Is data connected across all sources or does my technology operate in silos?
- Are my solutions scalable? Can I show how each solution contributes to my bottom line?
- Are my solutions efficient, can I automate tasks?
- Is this a software that can be quickly changed if it doesn’t work?
Assessing your technology will allow you to continue to optimize your software so that it better serves your customers, your staff, and your budget.
Leverage technology to generate more revenue: Technology advances can undoubtedly improve many business processes within the hotel industry. However, technology is in a constant state of flux and constantly unlocking new opportunities to improve customer satisfaction and boost internal efficiency, leaving hoteliers uncertain as to which technology solutions to choose and leverage to remain one-up on competition. But it’s important to remember that systems and technology alone do not solve issues, they provide a framework to support vital business processes and to take care of guests – It isn’t about chasing the latest shiny object in technology. Having the right framework in place provides the opportunity to leverage technology holistically…which leads us nicely to our next point.
Build an open technology stack: Running a hotel is tough enough without having to deal with closed technologies that don’t work together and don’t let you build on top of one another. Your technology stack should be flexible so that it can adapted to your business needs and not vice versa. Here’s where having an open stack can make all the difference. Instead of a huge technology stack composed of complicated yet compromised features (and only using 20% of them), hotels now have the option of selecting the perfect combination of software features to match their specific needs. And because these new pieces are specifically built to be easily integrated through APIs, building the perfect software stack happens in far less time than before – and also costs far less.
Stack solutions that are open and easily accessible are valuable; they last longer and grow with you as your business and industry grows.
Evaluating your technology allows you optimize your software so that it better serves your customers, your staff, and your budget. Once you have the right solutions in place, you can begin to focus on providing quality hospitality services and the best experience while leaving the rest to the technology.
