Hospitality Digital Technology: Challenges, Priorities and Buzzwords | - 4 views
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With the explosion of the “digital way of life”, the customer journey has become increasingly complex, forcing hoteliers overhaul not only their corporate and marketing strategies, but also their technology stack in order to engage, acquire, service and retain these digitally-enabled travel consumers across multiple digital touch points and across all digital channels and devices.
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Today’s hospitality is being transformed into a 100% digital technology-enabled industry powered by online, mobile, cloud, IoT, AI and blockchain tools and applications.
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Today, the vast majority of hoteliers are primarily focused on and investing in Guest Services Technology, while underinvesting in Guest Engagement, Acquisition and Retention Technology.
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Today’s hoteliers must create and manage a robust digital presence and engage, acquire, service and retain travel consumers in this increasingly mobile-first world.
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In other words, hoteliers’ technology focus and investments end where the OTA focus and investment begin.
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cloud hosting and CDN (Content Delivery Network) provides far better server response times and faster download speeds.
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Quite often different teams at the property use different sets of data in their day-to-day operations, creating a total “data integrity mess,” which directly affects the property’s guest acquisition and retention efforts.
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They must understand and invest in digital technology and marketing that enables the best possible user experience, provides the best customer service, increases efficiencies and boosts revenues.
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From a technology perspective, the challenge to hoteliers is to create a hotel and room environment that at least matches but preferably exceeds their guests’ home environment. In other words, hotel and room technology, amenities, and features should be the same or better than what guests already enjoy at home. These include:
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The future of this technology is the Smart Guestroom which will be completely personalized to guest preferences and loyalty member profile.
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Hoteliers are overwhelmed by the amount of technology, data, and digital marketing silos and the need to work with multitude of vendors in their guest acquisition and services efforts.
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Each team has its own technology tools, databases, and vendors which are not in communication with the other teams.
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Unlike hoteliers, the OTAs are focused exclusively and investing only in Guest Engagement, Acquisition and Retention Technology since they do not have to worry about on-property technology and guest experiences.
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These are the major impediments to the industry becoming a digital technology-driven and technology-savvy industry:
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Recently, an independent hotel introduced room service delivery robots, which would have been great if the rest of the hotel tech stack were in order, and if it weren’t for the 6-year old property website, and absence of any CRM technology.
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Hotels should first focus on the fundamentals of the technology stack before implementing more advanced things.
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The U.S. hospitality industry is a $155 billion industry. This provides endless opportunities for smart technology vendors to thrive and service the industry with state-of-the-art solutions.
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The industry has a “vendor deficit disorder” in the sense of being overwhelmed by the number of tech vendors and solutions out there.
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Hoteliers need to monitor, proactively inquire about and familiarize themselves with the Next Generation Technologies that are already making their way into hospitality, including Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), Voice Assistants, Chat Bots, Robotics, and Blockchain.
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Over the next 3-5 years we will witness wider adoption and implementation of the following next gen technologies:
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Unlike hoteliers, the OTAs are focused exclusively and investing only in Guest Engagement, Acquisition and Retention Technology.
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Hoteliers must wake up to the fact that by being primarily focused on and investing in Guest Services Technology, while underinvesting in Guest Engagement, Acquisition and Retention Technology, they are allowing the OTAs more visibility to engage, acquire and retain the online travel consumer.
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Digital technology is making its way into every aspect of the industry: hotel operations, guest services and communications, revenue management, distribution, CRM and marketing.
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Today’s hotelier must understand, know and use digital tech solutions in their everyday environment, and be able to assess, evaluate, recommend and acquire technology solutions to improve guest satisfaction, operational efficiencies and productivity, customer service and revenue.
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Website Technology: The property or hotel brand website has become the gravitational center of all hotelier’s efforts to engage, acquire and retain the customer. Any marketing efforts of the hotel today lead the potential customers to the hotel website. Today’s website technology includes cloud-based Content Management System (CMS), comprehensive merchandising suites, reservation abandonment tools, personalization pricing and content, technical SEO, cloud hosting, and robust analytics suite
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The goal here is very clear: bridge the guest data and technology silos in hospitality and create an end-to-end solution, empowering hotels to acquire new guests, engage current guests, and retain past guests by combining digital marketing, website, and CRM data into one cohesive marketing and personalization platform.
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The “digital way of life” adopted by today’s tech-savvy travel consumer is forcing the hospitality industry to accelerate the adoption of digital technologies and become a 100% digital technology-enabled industry.
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The article covers a great deal of the technology products in all of the hotel aspects. it also focuses on the fact that hotels are investing a lot in offering technological tangible services to the clients where must shift its focus a bit and invest more in the guest engagement technology to close the gap between them and OTAs.
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Hospitality is being transformed into a 100% digital technology-enabled industry; however, it is very challenging to maintain. Employees are overwhelmed by the amount of technology they need to lear to do their job efficiently
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This article focuses on the fact that technology is now being used in almost every aspect of the hotel industry. This is because hoteliers are beginning to understand that guests are expecting to enjoy the same level of technology used in the comfort of their homes when they are at hotels. Therefore, hotels that are more technologically advanced are more empowered to satisfy guests' technological needs, but the information collected by the hotels' systems also enables the hotels to acquire new guests, engage current guests and retain past guests; as such, there are benefits to both the hotels and guests when the level of technology offered is updated.