In today’s advancing technological age, finding the right balance between technology and human touch is becoming more and more difficult, but also even more important than ever before. With the amount of technology available to the industry, it’s tempting to simply find the newest and most innovative tools to streamline your business and cut as many costs as possible. However, it’s crucial to stop and think about what is really best for your business and which tools are the best fit and will bring the most productivity to your business without sacrificing the guest experience. With enough research and advice from experts, there is a way to find the best solution for your hotel business.
Travel Weekly says it best in this article’s title - “High Tech + High Touch = High Performance.” Providing your hotel with high-tech tools is necessary to propel your business into the changing technology industry of hotels, but without people to properly manage these tools with “high-touch,” there’s no way to ensure high performance. Guests who have become accustomed to the advancements in technology today will expect a certain level of tech in hotels, which is critical to attracting repeat guests and building customer loyalty. In this article, the author acknowledges the importance of data in hotels, but emphasizes that hotels need to be more guest-centric than data-centric to build loyalty. Data will help to identify guest preferences and understand their priorities during their stays. Once the data is combined with AI-powered technology and a digital twin model to enhance customer segmentation, the hotel can then use the data to build a more guest-centric approach.
Another area where data is especially useful lies in revenue management for a hotel. According to this article, there are a handful of trends to know in revenue management today,
which include reporting, data visualization, geographic information systems (GIS), the human factor in revenue management, and effective communication between the asset and revenue manager. Revenue managers rely on accurate data to make the best decisions for their hotel properties and drive revenue for their business. Technology plays a large role in a revenue manager’s job, which is why it’s important to invest in up-to-date tools to improve your hotel, which can be found here in this article’s new guide to revenue management best practices.
Data not only fuels the guest experience strategies and revenue management decisions, but it is also a major driver of innovation. As mentioned in this article, “data presents an invaluable opportunity for firms to innovate, but only if they know what to do with it.” The author expresses that simply mining data isn’t enough to drive innovation, but instead companies must use analytics to find hidden patterns in the data. One quickly-growing and innovative company has caught on to the importance of data science through its recent investment. According to this article, Oyo, the world’s third-largest chain of hotels from India, has acquired Danamica, the Denmark-based data science company, to leverage dynamic pricing across its brands and drive top-line growth. The immense value of data, data science, and data analytics is becoming abundantly clear to hotel companies around the world, which is changing the way we look at technology today. So, what’s next? Experts from a variety of technology, AI, and hotels have shared their thoughts on future trends to come in this article. The predictions for the next 15 years include AI-driven technology, voice controlled functions, digitalized glass walls, and fully wireless hotels. If they are right, it seems that we have quite a bit of exciting changes to look forward to!
