There is reason for optimism in the hospitality & tourism industry. The 2010 Soccer World cup is expected to bring a flood of tourists to South Africa. The intense media interest will stimulate tourism. This will in turn translate into a cash injection for the hospitality industry. This bodes well for IT investment in this cash-constrained industry. For the IT supplier, it is useful to understand the factors that influence the IT usage patterns in the hospitality industry.

Monday, July 20, 2009

Current Topical Hospitality Products

The focus in the hospitality industry is towards applications that do not simply automate operations, but rather apply technology creatively to innovate new products and services as well as new distribution channels.

A quick scan of the world wide web yielded the following untested list of applications that are currently receiving vendor focus in the hospitality industry:

- Packaging of product offerings, to create a need-satisfying bundle across industries (for example a holiday package may consist of accommodation, car rental, flight bookings, and casino or spa vouchers). These applications are especially relevant if they can be operated on a self-service platform, by the customer himself rather than a service intermediary.

- Intensification of self-service, through the provision of kiosks in hotel lobbies, to handle transactions like reservations, check-in, check-out and concierge functions e.g. incident reporting.

- Delivery of in-room services through technology. Examples are high speed internet, and entertainment options (e.g. video streaming) delivered via television. These applications increase the revenue per room.

- Integration of in-room services and CRM to deliver better service. Examples are i) storing a client's climate control preferences in the CRM, and using this information to automate settings at check-in and ii) the provision of in-room art that may be selected, and is then projected, with selections stored in the CRM, iii) keeping a client's dietary preferences (e.g. Kosher) in the CRM.

- Yield management, which offers innovative and complex pricing schemes, that marry supply and demand perfectly.

Thus current application trends in hospitality are for systems that do not simply automate operations, but instead create new technology-based products.

3 comments:

  1. How is the web based implementation of securing bookings successful in this industry? Larger hotels seems to have implemented automated web based booking systems while smaller hotels and guest houses, to a large extent, have not.

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  2. Yes, true, probably because it's the expensive systems that incorporate ASP pages not so much the low-range ones. And the small places have chronic bad connectivity, often no Internet at all, or dial-up. And often very poor hardware as well. But I haven't come across research specifically on this - I will check it out. Tx for comment, regards, k

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  3. Hospitality Wholesale is offering many kind of services like Commercial Food Equipment, Hospitality Products, Wholesale Hospitality etc.

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