Amid the ongoing turbulence surrounding the global pandemic and its consequential restrictions, the hotel industry, like others, has relied heavily on several technology solutions to achieve the most crucial element of business – automating operations to meaningfully engage with guests.
Let’s explore how technology has impacted this aspect of today’s competitive hotel business.
Operational automation via digitisation
It helps hotels become efficient and flexible by streamlining and standardising their day to business processes. It allows them to carry out daily operations with fewer resources in less time while eliminating errors and giving consistent outcomes. Here are a few examples –
Saves costs and CAPEX: Saving costs is the most crucial target for hotels across segments as the industry is down due to the pandemic. Even though things are looking a little better now, they are still under tremendous pressure to cut costs while adopting newer technology platforms.
For example, a cloud-based Hotel PMS can solve this problem with a subscription-based model. Besides saving big by not paying huge upfront licence costs, hotels don’t have to make additional investments in costly servers and even in a dedicated IT team. The point here is that the right technology can help hotels reduce software ownership costs. Just to give you a sense, the cost of these servers should fund for multiple years of cloud PMS subscription.
Reduces errors and saves time: Let’s say a 100-room large hotel is connected to ten OTAs to sell its rooms. When OTA 1 sells five rooms, the availability should reflect as 95 on all the OTAs and the hotel staff like the front-desk, the sales team etc., should also have the updated inventory in real-time.
After every reservation, manually updating all the OTAs is an error-prone, time-consuming task. Plus, this would lead to operational hazards and loss of business opportunities due to double-booking and overbooking. However, process automation via cloud-based solutions like a Hotel PMS and an integrated channel manager does the job. These systems will now take care of it by updating availability and rates across all the OTAs in real-time.
Enhances mobility and collaboration: What’s the point of having a technology that makes hotel decision-makers stick to their workstations or offices? That’s why, in the recent past, gaining mobility has emerged as one of the most critical outcomes of technology adoption.
However, hoteliers can do away with this operational bottleneck with a cloud Hotel PMS as they can now access the application and essential hotel data over the web via any handheld devices. And then, there is a Mobile Hotel App for on-the-go execution of hotel operations.
Not only this, but technology also allows for better collaboration between hotel staff. For example, many non-guest-facing hotel staff working remotely can access the PMS from their respective locations and team up with on-site staff for efficient execution of daily activities.
Empowers with centralised control: This is vital for chain or group hospitality entities. When they embrace digitisation in the form of a cloud Hotel PMS, they are poised to gain solid control over their multi-property operation. They can monitor their group-level activities from a central location with a single sign-on. It also saves time by helping them manage multiple travel agents and corporate profiles centrally. Decision-makers can also access group/property-level operation-critical data to make informed decisions.
Guest engagement via digitization: Technology can automate many critical guest engagement and service areas. It allows hotels to know their guests better and understand their requirements to offer superior service. Here are a few examples –
Helps understand guests’ preferences: Hospitality Technology’s 2021 Customer Engagement Technology Study reveals that around 44% of guests choose a hotel with the right technology solution to offer personalised services based on their past purchasing history. This is possible when hotels deploy a multi-property management solution. They can access the centralised guest history to know past guests’ preferences.
For example, Mr. Jones had stayed in Property A of ABC Group in 2019. He had opted for a sea-facing room, continental breakfast, and single-malt whisky during his stay. When he comes back to either the same property or any other group property in 2022, he would expect the staff to offer personalised services based on his past preferences.
The system lets the team know about his earlier buying patterns during the booking stage. It helps provide a consistent experience to returning guests across all the group properties to win over their loyalty.
Allows to offer self-service/contactless experience: Right from making hotel reservations, selecting rooms, checking in, unlocking the door, controlling in-room activities, making payments, to checking out – today’s guests like to do all using their smartphones. Our clients have noticed that over 80% of their guests are now asking for at least one or more of these self-service features.
So how does a hotel take care of this? The answer is – technology. In a competitive business scenario, when every hotel offers more or less the same services minus the grandeur, rolling out such contactless services helps a hotel stand out from the competition.
Automates guest feedback collection process: Hotels can use the power of technology to send out pre-scheduled emails to checked-out guests asking for their feedback on their services and offerings. There are two major benefits to it.
First – with automation, they don’t miss out on sending emails to their guests seeking what they think about them. Second – it significantly cuts down staff effort and time, ultimately reducing errors that could have happened with human intervention.
It also increases a hotel’s online ratings and reputation across third-party hotel booking sites and hundreds of review sites. According to Hospitality Technology’s 2021 Customer Engagement Technology Study, positive ratings and guest reviews matter for over 70% of guests, influencing their booking decisions.
There are endless ways to save costs, reduce errors, increase revenue, and serve guests with technology-enabled automation. For example, intelligent technology solutions can help hotels judiciously use their HVAC systems to save on electricity costs, one of the major components of its operating costs. In the end, there is no room to think that hoteliers can survive without technology as it is the key to doing more with less while enhancing overall capabilities, boosting the brand value, staying future-ready, and offering remarkable services to guests.
