Technology in Hospitality, Evolution, Innovation and Guests.
/In hospitality, technology is a complicated problem. For an industry that has historically excelled and set the bar for customer experience, buying technology solutions has not been on the top of the list. Not because hoteliers like to be old fashioned, but because until recently guests really didn't care. Guests do care about the quality of the mattresses; they care about the wear in the carpets. They care about hot water, air conditioning and operational elevators.
But innovation and competitive advantage in guest experience and comfort is not going to come from installing an elevator or hot water. Those innovations were solved a long time ago. On the material side of comfort, innovation has pretty much plateaued. The future of innovation in guest experience is through technology.
In the 2000s there were approximately one billion computer users, most of them PC users, either wealthy enough to have a computer at home or they had to use a computer at work or school. In other words, very few of the guests were active computer users during their stay. Today we have over four billion computer users, most of them using a smartphone. We can quite safely assume that every hotel guest is now an active computer user during their stay.
The future of hotel guest experience is based on how good your technology is. Let me explain.
"Hospitality being slow to adopt."
In the hospitality industry and more specifically, the technology side of the hospitality industry, it is often said that technology moves slowly. That hotels don't invest enough in technology, and thus systems are old, and new technology doesn't get adopted fast enough.
But if one looks back over the last century and if we look up from our iPhone and it's frantic iteration cycle that we've been accustomed to, things have evolved - a hundred years ago we celebrated elevators in hotels. Today guests complain if there isn't a ramp up to the front desk.
Enterprise technology doesn't evolve fast, from a vendor side, it might, but for the customer side, it doesn't. In fact despite everyone being tired of hearing cloud-this and cloud-that today only 20-30% of Fortune 100 companies have moved to cloud systems. And those old mainframe computers that were invented in the 1950s and which most people only get to see in movies, well they're still selling, in fact, over 70% of the Fortune 500 companies use them
