The amount of software that hotels use is increasing every year. Not all of it is necessary, but some of these tools are of course extremely useful. And as the industry continues to utilize more digital tools and the internet, those who don’t adopt the major tools or channels will get left in the dust.
To stay competitive hotels need more tools to better understand their guests and improve service. Today it’s a competitive advantage, tomorrow, not having them is a disadvantage.
Tools like our analytics dashboard are part of a new category of hotel tech, evolved from revenue-management oriented analytics into a broad reporting solution that many departments or managers can use.
But these hospitality-centric analytics tools didn’t exist a few years ago so a some hotels have understandably asked us, “Why do I need it now?” Well, the short answer is, the more you know now, the faster you’ll be able to adjust pricing, services, and react to the market. And anyone who has daily access to high quality information (through analytics apps or elsewhere) will remain competitive.
Eventually, those who don’t will be left behind as the industry evolves. This isn’t a sales pitch. Look at how OTAs arrived on the market.
Hotel’s didn’t believe there was much money to be made online, so they left it to someone else and today one of the biggest discussions is how to take back revenue from OTAs.
The same is happening today with hotel data.
But as one of the oldest and most prestigious industries in the world, the hospitality industry is also one that believes in traditions. After all, the ultimate goal of a hotel is to take care of guests. It isn’t chasing the latest shiny object in technology.
The challenge lies in finding the right tools to improve the guests’ experience while maintaining or increasing revenue. Adapting to the new tools has been historically slow and painful for hotels.
Why? Two words: Closed stacks. Let’s back up and I’ll explain.
Read rest of the article at SnapShot
