Enhanced guest comfort, operational efficiency and cloud solutions
Cloud solutions have been at the forefront of digital transformations for most of the industries across the world and hospitality is no aberration. In my view, we are one of the largest client facing industries with multiple tiers of interactions. Every hotel would like to manage these three aspects of business:
1 Guest Interactions
2 Employee Engagement
3 Owner Engagement
Guest comforts become primary to build sustainable revenue channels for hotels. However, it is usually not as easy as it looks. Each guest has their preference and is usually very complex. Hotels have invested extensively on human intelligence over the years to manage guest engagements. However, with unprecedented growth in inventory and demand coupled with shrinking skilled human resources, use of technology becomes imperative to manage the guest interactions effectively.
There are three different phases to effective guest engagement:
1 Pre-Arrival: Utilising guest-facing tools to collect preferences, dietary information, and cultural nuances is a proactive approach to enhance the guest experience.
2 On Arrival: The use of conversational AI, virtual concierge, voice automation, and facial recognition demonstrates the industry’s adaptation to modern technologies for improved guest satisfaction.
3 On Departure (Re-Targetting): The use of data analytics and technologies like Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning can help hotels understand guest needs proactively and optimise procurement channels.
Guest engagement starts even before the guest comes to the hotel. Today, there are a number of guest facing tools that are available to interact and collect guest preferences including dietary preferences, arrival time and in-room amenities. Also, these tools are effective in communicating local nuances and cultural prerequisites. For example, if a guest is travelling to a jungle resort, the must-carries, dos and don’ts of the jungle and safari timings etc can be communicated with ease with specific questions being answered back from the same platforms using NLP engines.
I feel the use of conversational AI is the future of hospitality business just as are use of tech platforms that offer on demand content which is already catching up and use of virtual bots which are on the rise. We can foresee non-invasive guest tools like virtual concierge, voice automations and facial recognition being deployed in India, most of which are in pursuit of enhanced guest satisfaction. Few hotels have used tech enablement coupled with human interactions beautifully to cover every aspect of a guest journey right for the point of looking for hotel booking to departure.
In a traditional set up of server-based technology, it has been observed that the data either is redundant or unhygienic while cloud enables the data to be collected multiple sources with greater accuracy. For example, a guest travelling to one of the partner hotels in India should be visible for a check-in anywhere in the world. Cloud technology enables it with ease and it eases the data collection across the hotels in a group. Once the data collection process is streamlined, data analytics become easier and more accurate.
Cloud technology enables to run complex data analytics on the available data to ensure guest needs are proactively looked into. The usage of underlying technologies like AI and ML will enable hoteliers to save costs by optimising procurement channels.
Today’s guests have greater expectations from technology while at the hotel. Gen Z is already asking for a complete frictionless check-in and in room automation. However, I foresee a comprehensive usage of human capital and technology. The hotels in South Asia are implementing contactless IRD ordering, usage of concierge tools to look for places to visit nearby and order some local merchandises, with open tech architecture, cloud providers are now able to connect to various hotel partners and get them under one roof enhancing the guest satisfaction manifold.
When the guest leaves the hotel, the underlying algorithms help the hoteliers be in constant touch with them, understanding their travel and pain-points in customer journey, the analytics coupled with AI and ML and platforms like meta for business provide clear advantage to hotels that use technology effectively.
I strongly believe the hotels should evaluate comprehensive digital transformation strategies encompassing all the stakeholders instead of looking at user department related deployments. The hotel leadership teams are now investing more time and effort into persona change and digital outlook. However, I foresee more strategic positions being opened by hotel management companies to handle the strategic tech implementations, this in the next decade or so will completely change the way business is done to counter both demand and supply redundancies.
Author Bio: Vivek Gangishetty is Head of Sales – India & South Asia, RMS Cloud
