A brave new world

The advent of online, and the consumer voice that is now being heard on Web sites, in forums, and on blogs across the world, has changed the hospitality industry - most would say for the better.

Says EMC applications consultant John Brookmyre: “Members of the hotel and leisure industry need to adapt to the dramatic changes in routes to market and user behaviour patterns following the evolution of the Internet. Visits to travel agents are a thing of the past. Today, people use a wide range of sources, including interactive maps and user-generated content to plan their journeys.

“Thanks to the prevalence of user-generated content, the reputation of companies in the hotel and leisure industry is now in the public domain,” Brookmyre says. “This is why technology has become so critical.”

Thanks to the Internet, channels to market have changed radically.

Says Brookmyre: “Everyone's patterns have changed. They no longer go to travel agents, they go on virtual tours and see video footage of hotel complexes.”

Sites like TripAdvisor, IgoUgo and Cruise Critic put the power firmly in the hands of the traveller. As Brookmyre notes: “A hotel's reputation today is controlled by the Internet. People are writing exactly what they feel, but, more importantly, people have started to listen. You can go to sites like Expedia and check what people thought of a resort before going. Travel industry reputation is now very much in the public domain.”

And the industry needs to respond. It needs to be online, and available, and responsive to complaints. It needs to be savvy enough to take disgruntled guests offline and into private channels where disputes can be resolved. It needs to monitor its reputation and respond to that. For some stuffy, old-fashioned organisations, this is a major cultural shift.

The Internet is also changing the way back-end services are delivered. Says a GijimaAst hospitality industry business development exec: “What we're looking at now is providing software as a service (SaaS) to the industry. We have the software and they pay per transaction, so no booking, no pay. What we supply is a distribution management system. Property management systems run at each hotel, each has a system with a database plus server, operational systems, connectivity into their head office and/or the reservation hub. Managing that requires skills. Hotels are 24/7/365 so they can't switch off. Once we can get to offering all of those systems as managed SaaS, we'll have almost their ideal world. We're not there yet, though.”

Says Softline Accpac sales director Keith Fenner: “What we're doing, having looked at cloud services, is launching an e-marketing service. It uses either hosted or on-premise CRM. All the technical hardware configurations, and spam rules and engines live in our cloud service. The kicker is we take away the IT problem, deliver 100 000 e-mail by pre-defined rules and all of the information comes back to the hotel's CRM system. At the moment it's all one-way traffic, with no feedback. The information coming back can then be integrated back into the CRM system and hopefully into the reservation system so when a guest arrives, you don't ask him to fill in a card because you'll have just sent him an e-mail and will have all his details.”

Fenner's example is just one of many things technology can do for the hospitality segment, provided it's willing to embrace the change.