The ever-evolving technology has been changing the working style, guest experiences, and travellers’ expectations in the industry. Therefore it is wise to assess the right technology and partner for your business. But, how can you make this decision process simple and find the right partner? Let’s find out.
Why Hotel Technology is Important for Your Property
Let’s start with an example: David has been running successfully his hotel in the suburbs of Scotland for almost 15 years. But things have changed a lot during this period and the industry has come a long way. The hospitality business has changed completely with the advent of technology and it is now a whole new ball game.
Whilst in past he would get booking from walk-in customers and telephone calls, now his online booking register is filled with entries from multiple online booking platforms, not only growing his distribution globally but also increasing his property’s visibility and building its brand in the process.
Achieving all of this without the aid of the right technology would be a far-fetched dream for David. Having the support of the right technologies that complement each other is crucial to win the booking game battle. While Property Management System (PMS) may be the backbone for a property, without support from complimenting technologies like the channel manager, website booking engine, revenue management system, you may find it difficult to achieve your dream. Therefore, David wants to use more online technologies to improve his property’s revenue.
7 Tips to Choose The Right Hotel Technology For Your Property
How does one pick the best and most relevant technology for their hotel? Can this process be simple considering the dearth of providers available on the market, who all promise to solve your problems? Here’s what David did to master the technology for his property.
1. Clearly Define the Goals of Technology Partnerships
It is important to list out reasons, as a part of your pre-purchase check, by answering the following questions:
- What do you want to achieve by adopting the new technology?
- How would your success be measured and how will this be evaluated?
2. Keep the Infrastructure Simple
Unlike the past, where expensive, on-premise systems were used, current technologies focus on cloud-based software solutions, as they are simple and easily deployable. Apart from ease of setup, these systems can be maintained and accessed from anywhere.
3. Choose the Right Integrated Technology Options
What’s the use of having the best technologies unless they integrate well enough to communicate rightly with one another? It is important for the PMS to talk to the channel manager to eliminate silos, so you are able to spend more time delivering guest experiences.
4. Access Analysis and Reports Available from Technology
Automated reporting and detailed insights are available through technology, which not only eases your tasks (as building and tweaking reports in excel sheets can get very time-consuming) but also provides you with error-free data, so you are able to make the right decisions.
5. Sign Up for Easily Usable and Friendly Technology
Careful attention needs to be paid to the User Experience of the platform you are considering. Not only should it be efficient and time-saving, but it should be simple and easy to use. It is always a good idea to try the technology before you buy it and assess it for its usability. A feature-rich platform that is difficult to navigate and requires constant training to be worked upon is not ideal in any scenario.
6. Analyse Service and Support
Making sure to have access to active support from the technology partner is important, as glitches do happen. It’s technology after all, but with the right service and support, you can ride this tide easily.
7. Look Around and Evaluate Options
It is a good idea to do a swot analysis of features by every platform before you buy it. Mapping these features against what you’ll use, and also comparing various technology providers’ offerings, will help decide on the most suited technology for your needs.
To get the most out of your marketing and revenue management strategies, hotel technology is a necessity for every hotel these days. The tips in this article help you to select the right technology partners for your company, so you can optimise your processes.
Hotel technology is an ever-growing, ever-changing, concept because it’s still so young. The size of the industry is huge but in reality, hotel technology has really only established itself in the last decade or two. There are still thousands of hotels across the world that haven’t adopted a wide-ranging technology strategy. This is why so much opportunity exists for hotel businesses and technology developers alike. However, even on opposite sides of the world hotels have the same basic business goals to optimize distribution, drive bookings, and create a healthy revenue stream. The avenue towards these objectives may vary strategically but the most successful properties have at least one thing in common: they all use sophisticated hotel technology and software.
I just love your tips about choosing hotel technology. It helped me so much. Please keep publishing more informational blog posts like this.