The Focus Is Changing
A look back over 10 years and ahead to the future
by Mike Preston, Prismea Consulting
Technology within the hotel operation has changed considerably over the past decade; however that progress may well be dwarfed by changes in the coming years. The hotel world is fast catching up with other industries in recognising the essential role of information technology in hotel services and at long last adopting standards. The only factor holding back even faster progress is, as ever, the lack of investment from hotels and historically some lack of vision from the software vendors.
In 1997 technology was already well established in hotels with a wide selection of PMS (Property Management Systems) suppliers. Restaurants with POS, clubs with Membership Systems and all venues with Conference & Banqueting / Sales & Catering Systems were all taking advantage of the speed, efficiency and flexibility of software packages designed for the hospitality world. At that time software authors tended to specialist in one area – the PMS, the spa, the golf booking, yield or revenue management, the back office, etc. Different systems were interfaced – a fairly basic transfer of data from one system where the data was in one format or database into another. Over the years this has evolved into first of all integrated systems where the movement of data between, say, the PMS and the Conferencing was more elegant and efficient. This was partly due to the vendors expanding their range of products or creating strategic alliances with best-of-breed product authors in non-competing areas.
The next development was the evolution of a wider range of applications including web booking, affordable Central Reservation Systems (CRS) and some focus on marketing with Business Intelligence (BI) tools and Customer Relations Management (CRM) applications. On the technology front the vendors adopted evolving standards of established databases such as Microsoft SQL, adapted to provide enterprise-wide applications and, of course, accommodated in different ways the power of the Internet. Inevitably the big boys with the additional resources led the way followed by the smaller niche market players who have to be sure which horses to back before risking time and money.
However, the vendors have been largely playing ‘catch-up' with each other. One company loses some deals because they do not have feature X and so they develop that feature as a defensive strategy first, an additional benefit to existing clients as a bonus. Thus as the products become more mature, they become more similar. This is when the real benefit of client relations and quality support, the soft differentiators, come into play. I am sure they will all claim a raft of ‘product differentiators', however, in my view, the fundamental has been missed for a long-time. To be fair to the software authors, they have to be driven by commercial priorities and if hotels are only allocating minimal budget to IT, would they ‘pay up' for a better solution? Until it is tried no one knows – but that is too expensive a gamble for the developers.
My view is that the focus needs to change significantly – and there are signs that others have similar views to mine. I believe we must get away from being product driven and become information-driven. This calls for a sea-change in attitude and direction.
The user community, apart from the major groups, is not technology driven and wants to focus on its core business of delivering quality service, driving up occupancy and driving down costs. To do that they need information.
The Vision
The vision is to focus on the hotel or restaurant's IT needs – getting the right information, at the right place, in the right format, at the right time, to the right people. These users do not care where it comes from or what product sources the data.
The vision is to focus on the Solution, not individual products. It is an Enterprise solution creating, in effect, a scaleable Hospitality ERP system linking many different products and technologies to deliver the information solution as described above. Products in themselves become immaterial – just components in the wider application that when standards have evolved sufficiently, can be unplugged and plugged easily to maintain the most efficient total solution.
The need is for a series of User or Departmental Portals to layer over the top of the diverse applications to deliver the real solution to hotels, restaurants, venues and spas. Part of the solution would be a web-portal to interact with the Internet.
An example would be a GM Portal or Corporate Pulse with a single screen showing Today's Occupancy, Today's VIP arrivals, Bank Balance, Revenue this week/month, News highlights, etc. and the ability to drill down into any topic. The Commissionaire can have the VIP list, Flight information from the Web, static data such as local taxi and restaurant data, etc. The revenue manager, spa manager, golf pro, housekeeping manager and conference manager can all have tailored portals. This process clearly involves extracting data from PMS, CRS, Spa, Web, GDS, Accounting Systems, POS, etc. The use of hand-held devices including mobile phones, wireless communications and intranet / extranet to deliver this total solution will increase and extend to the corporate office where the estate-wide picture will be available.
To achieve all this, the hospitality industry needs standards such as those seen for many years in the banking sector for data exchange and inter-bank operation. After a couple of failed attempts in the past in hospitality, the evolving Open Travel Alliance (OTA) and the Hotel Technology Next Generation Group (HTNG) projects are an opportunity to achieve genuine progress – and are now really starting to deliver.
The vendors are also moving in the same direction. There are many examples now of these companies delivering practical solutions today. Examples include SoftBrands Hospitality's Core with its Enterprise Reservation Portal giving customised views for different functions and flexible data extraction, Iris Software's Personal Valet – a Guest Information Portal collating data from disparate systems and GoConcierge with its dedicated concierge portal for task management and guest services. The interesting factor with these examples, and there are many more from other suppliers, is that software authors are working closer together than ever before and systems are being designed with open interfaces – built for sharing data.
The giant leap will come when standards have evolved to enable these systems to access data from competitor's products.
The commercial drivers will be the same as for today's product-based IT strategy – increased revenue, reduced cost, greater efficiency and more management information. The benefit of information-led solutions is that the GM or the commissionaire will be more efficient, provide better, faster service to clients and react faster to issues arising anywhere in the operation.
The impact of the Internet on hospitality operational will continue the rapid expansion already seen. VOIP, ASP solutions, mobile phone applications, web-based training, web-based support services will grow in all sectors not just hospitality – again speed, convenience and cost-saving are the key benefits. So those who manage hotels and restaurants need to follow the examples in other industries. That involves a continuous dialogue with their software supplies, making real commitment to pressure groups like HTNG who potentially have the power to influence developments on behalf of the hospitality users, investing in technology as a long-term strategic process not just 5-year product replacements and the recognition that technology is essential to maintain the competitive advantage. Technology changes over the past 10 years may seem exceptional, and they included the Y2K factor and the web explosion, but this rate of change can be expected to be the norm as technology will play an increasingly significant part of hotel and restaurant management in the future.
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