Thought Leaders in Hospitality
I was invited to attend the ‘Thought Leaders in Hospitality’ breakfast meeting this morning which was organised by SiteMinder, Revinate and IDeaS and held on board The Sunborn Yacht Hotel which is docked at Excel.
The theme of the meeting was to look at ‘What will the hotel industry look like in 2020?’ The session was facilitated by Peter O’Connor, who is the Professor of Information Systems and Dean of Academic Programs at Essec Business School in France. The group consisted of international hoteliers, hotel partners and hospitality ‘tech guys’.
The two questions posed to us were:
- The guest of 2020 will…?
- Technology systems that no hotelier will be without in 2020 are…?
Prior to the meeting research was carried out on both these questions, and the answer to the first question is that the guest of 2020 will want unique experiences, higher expectations, expect to be recognised and will move to using mobile technology. This was no surprise to me, and for those of you that have read my book ‘Star Quality Experience’ you will see what hoteliers are already doing to ensure this happens.
It was interesting to see that the second questions about technology systems was a bit of stumbling block for some hoteliers. As the research showed the technology dominating this was Revenue Management Systems, CRM systems and PMS… which was the same results of similar research carried out 10 years ago. This shows that in the mind of hoteliers the perception of hospitality technology has not moved forward.
The hospitality industry has always been a little slow on the uptake of technology. Although now is the time to embrace it as it advances at an ever increasing rate. From discussions around the table we delved in to this in more detail and the top three ideas of how technology systems will evolve for 2020 were:
- To have an integrated set of rich guest data which would lead to a guest centric operating system
- Message integration with guests
- Artificial Intelligence based systems
We then looked at the barriers of what might stop this from happening… and then we ran out of time. So if you want to know how to prepare for the technological advances in hospitality, then I will keep you posted and let you know when the white paper on this is published.
For now, if you need assistance understanding the ‘tech’side of your business, whether it be from your website, use of social media, guest profiling, trip advisor reviews, or working with OTA’s for example, then schedule a call.