Many hotels today are like older cars, in that technology has enabled them to really push their performance, but it also becomes a limiting factor if the existing structure cannot keep bolting on new solutions to old systems.
If you bought a new car today, you would expect it to come with a dashboard that affords Bluetooth technology so that you could connect everything to your smartphone. You would expect built-in digital maps with turn-by-turn navigation, as well as all the other new technology to be factory-installed.
Those of us with older cars may have access to all that technology as well, but they are clumsier to install and integrate into one seamless experience. You might find your windscreen crowded out with devices, and you will soon run out of cigarette lighter ports to plug everything in.
We are all excited to fit in all the new hotel technologies into our operations and processes but will soon face significant limitations to what the technology can do for us. The hospitality industry’s basic IT architecture is very inefficient.
The good news is the industry has turned a corner with regards to technology, with hotels moving their focus away from trying to develop proprietary systems in-house and thinking more about cloud-based services. The 2017 Lodging Technology Study, produced by Hospitality Technology and the University of Nevada Las Vegas Hotel College, found more than half of hotel IT executives plan to have one or more of several systems run in the cloud by 2018. The report said those platforms already include or would soon include a PMS, RMS, CRS or systems for loyalty, sales or catering.
But saying your tech stack is “in the cloud” will not fix a lot of the problems if the architecture is
Saying your tech stack is “in the cloud” will not help if your IT architecture is poor.
poorly designed and closed off from other systems. Hotel companies need to be already thinking of what’s next.
The next breakthrough is likely to have to happen at the hands of hotel company CIOs. The ones who will get ahead and push through the next wall will be those who figure out the best way to align systems so that data is shared accurately and in real time, allowing properties to maximise potential and revenue.
The key question to ask would be this: If you could design your tech platform to work in concert from the beginning, how would you do it? Would you merely forklift every piece of technology at property level to the cloud? Does that solve everything? Probably not.
If all this sounds too daunting, a quick win might be to move just data, rather than the mission-critical systems, off premise. A cloud-hosted system for storing reservation or transaction data could centralise it where the PMS, CRS and other systems can update it in real time. Other technology vendors could also call upon that data in the same place to use in different applications or software programmes.
While this exercise may not translate into less on-premise hardware for the property in the immediate term, it will lay the groundwork for being able to decommission costly data servers.
Hotels should continue to insist on and push for interoperability among their different systems — either on premise or in the cloud.
It may be tough work now, but it will certainly be worthwhile. An inflection point will come, not necessarily when every hotel has every piece of its tech stack in the cloud, but rather when a majority of hotel systems can at least integrate with one another and use the same data.
The first important step in hotel technology strategy is to conceive a plan of how you want to build your IT architecture and have it all work in sync.
