Hospitality Industry Technology Myth

The myth of technology in hospitality industry has always been looked upon as added cost where usage is limited to capturing reservations, check-ins, check-outs, housekeeping, night audits and revenue accounting .

It was never viewed upon as an investment for the hospitality organization and scaling the usage of the data into meaningful reports to make critical and quick business decisions which could have taken the hotel further. The lack of apprehension on the importance of computerization and its benefits among the older generation of hoteliers does not help much as most of the leaders of the industry today grew from rank and file.

We can never declare that technology usage in the industry had reached the maturity as compared to other industries e.g. banking and etc. There exist a large gap for adoption of technology into the current hospitality industry environment which is not restricted to CRM, on-line reservation, HSIA, Energy saving and etc.

Look into larger perspective and scalability of technology where total solutions working in sync as an integrated solution had posed the biggest challenge of the industry. The industry will never have a single vendor supplying all the computerize solutions for a property but minimizing the interfacing required among the solutions is what is important.

Truly integrated solutions has it's advantage which hotel properties should embark upon. This leads us to an environment where interfacing between a front office solutions with a third party financial solutions is regarded as integrated solutions. If that is the truth then what do we call situations where the front office and financial solutions are from the same vendor? So this is where users are "blinded" by the terms used in brochures, proposals and presentations. Is this a case of misrepresentation or purchase decision are based on comfort factor?

Benefits of a total integrated environment are;
(a) data flow had been carefully design during the program design stage to ensure that no need
for additional interfacing effort and cost to hotel,
(b) data drop during transmission arising from interfacing is almost non-existent as compared to
environemnt with solutions heavily interfaced,
(c) provides easier scalability,
(d) easier task to perform data mining,
(e) reduce cost of database investment as some solutions may use different system softwares,
(f) enhance performance of personnel when data from all sources able to flow and displayed on
screen in a dashboard format,

So, are hospitality technology investment decisions based on comfort factor or business objectives and roadmap? Your call.