Research Identifies 4 Hotel Technology Challenges for Every Hospitality Business in 2019
Technology in the hotel industry has done great wonders to help businesses achieve a competitive edge while delivering premium experiences to all their guests. This technological transition, however, brings with it several challenges that hotel owners & management should be informed about.
Today, we take a look at the brilliant research paper, Technology in the Hospitality Industry: Prospects and Challenges, by Prasanna Kansakar, Arslan Munir, and Neda Shabani. The research team analyzes the hospitality industry and the massive technology transfer happening within. While they identify both prospects and challenges, we are in particularly interested in the issues that technology faces in the hospitality business.
In the 2018 research paper the researchers identify four major challenges for hospitality technology:
- Interoperability
- Data Management
- Security & Privacy
- Responsiveness
Interoperability of Hotel Technology Systems
Due to the lack of standardization and specialized hospitality technology solutions, most hotels tend to develop their own proprietary solutions to manage assets. Popular hospitality technology solution providers like ORACLE do pitch in with their complex PMS and back office solutions, there are however diverse hotel management solutions available across the world.
The issue with proprietary solutions is that they do not have the potential to be implemented across all hotel franchises. Hospitality businesses cannot centralize management and require dedicated solutions to make different technologies work in cohesion.
The inoperability of hotel technologies can impose unwanted restrictions on the service delivery process. Loss of revenue is just one of many repercussions hotels can face due to unorganized technology infrastructures. Inoperability also affects the guest experience, creating conflicts and causing inconvenience that contradicts the service delivery promise especially in branded franchise hotels.
Non-standardized technology can induce added learning times & on-boarding periods for guests. Such technologies can also demonstrate interface issues and compliance risks on guest smart devices. This issue readily highlights the significance of applied technology management.
Data Management
Gathering guest data is essential to the success of any modern business, hotels are no different. Knowing and understanding customers is essential in predicting their behavior, future visits, and demands. New technology applications in hospitality bring more data to hotel databases. Personalization requires significant data gathering, allowing hotels to deliver a unique experience to each individual guest.
Hospitality companies gather data through a plethora of mediums including guest-facing systems, smart devices connected top hotel networks, and satisfaction surveys. Modern hotels must carry technologies capable of collecting & analyzing data from diverse sources. Personalization of services requires ready analysis from back-office systems, profiling guests through smart devices (IoT) as they enjoy the technology experience.
Data management carries great emphasis in European countries, more so than their North American counterparts. While the current US government believes in a more lenient approach towards data retention and privacy, European nations tend to focus more on the confidentiality of personal data. Effective legislation like the European Union’s GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), and local laws in the UK, Switzerland, Norway, Germany, France etc.
As the amount of data grows within hotel databases, the responsibility of back office management is quadrupled. Growing concerns over data management can only be addressed through leading-edge technology infrastructures. Authorization for data access, network & database security, and centralized database management are major concerns for hotels in the coming age.
