Bedding down

The hotel and leisure market is extremely competitive, customer service is critical, and making sure you have every bell and whistle your guests expect, when they expect it and where they expect it, is non-negotiable.

Like many people-intensive industries, however, the hospitality industry is reliant on imperfect material (humans) with which to deliver products and services to customers.

Taking the human error factor out of the equation can help, leaving staff to deal with more intelligent and less menial tasks, and improving product quality and customer satisfaction levels. Where to start, though?

Says HP ProCurve country manager Lorna Hardie: “Hospitality organisations are typically very quick on the uptake when it comes to new technology. They need to stay ahead of the competition and differentiate themselves. They need to offer the best experience possible to guests and to do that they need stable, reliable IT infrastructure.”

The basic mechanism for delivering IT services today is the network. Connectivity may be a dirty word in South Africa but it's mandatory in hotels worldwide.

Says Allan Gordon, hospitality industry business development exec at GijimaAst: “When we're talking connectivity and networks, organisations are working towards unified communications infrastructures that let them combine voice/data/images all in one. It's the way that we're hoping it's going to move. New hotels are going up, old ones need revamping; we're hoping we can move away from the old co-ax, and Cat 3, 6, 5 cabling and move to wireless.”

Some hotels have already made the switch. Ubiquitous wireless access is a given in the UK and many parts of Europe, for example, and some local hotels are following suite. The Westin Grand Arabella Quays, in Cape Town, has just gone wireless throughout.

Says Westin Hotels & Resorts IT manager Brett Gonsalves: “There is an expectation for high-speed Internet access throughout the hotel. Clients can now walk from the car park to the restaurant on the 19th floor with their wireless devices connected without interference or dropping.”

There is an expectation for high-speed Internet access throughout the hotel.

Brett Gonsalves, IT manager, Westin Hotels & Resorts

Providing always-on Internet access for guests is one thing, but you need to be able to prioritise traffic, as Gordon says. “The problem is you can only offer so much. You need to be able to prioritise traffic to business guests and away from the teenagers downloading YouTube on the 10th floor.”

Gonsalves agrees, adding: “We set up profiles for guests, and can personalise their service, so if we know a guest always goes to CNN when we set up that preferential settings filter, we can make it his landing page. We can prioritise to let a guest have more bandwidth if they need it. Scaling and flexibility on the network is in our hands, not at the provider or vendor's discretion, so we can tailor-make the experience per guest.”

There are a number of 'criticals' in any hospitality organisation. The first is the facilities, like air-conditioning, and the facility as a whole, like making sure guest rooms get cleaned, towels replaced and so on. Then there's the transactional side, says Hardie, and the security needed to ensure that guest data doesn't go walk-about, as well as the actual billing, which needs to be accurate and timeous. And then there's the back-end.

Sun City recently implemented an Accpac solution, replacing its Oracle Financials in a bid to cut costs and move in line with the rest of the group, which runs Accpac.

Says Ugen Govender, commercial manager, Gaming North at Sun International: “For many years we were put off by the size of the implementation/conversion. Now that it's done, we're benefiting from being on what is the standard package for the rest of the group so we can use economies of scale in terms of building interfaces, future developments and so on. By using Oracle, we had to do interfaces and development on its own in the past.”

Says Softline's Keith Fenner: “For a long time we fixed the back office, so we understand that billings are correct, cost-control is correct, consumption, etc, is 100% fine, and has been for a long time.

“If I'm a repeat visitor to a location, or it's a special occasion kind of event, you expect people to remember, recognise and welcome you back. This fundamentally hasn't linked back to IT,” he says.

Fenner has a point. Hotels and the like don't make use of the information in their back-end systems to deliver good service at the front end.

“What IT can deliver is CRM and BI,” he says. “A lot of these front office systems [the de facto is Micros Fidelio's Opera system] tend to have a flavour of CRM, but it is a lightweight. It's not what we would define as CRM in terms of our application sets.

“Simple things like a 'thank you for staying with us' e-mail or a 'welcome back' e-mail should be generated automatically by the system, with no human intervention. It should understand trends, so if, for example, I'm there once a month for 12, then not there, it should trigger 'we miss you' e-mails, special offers, 'bring a friend', etc. There should be formal rules and policies geared to drive business.”

The problem, he says, is that front office systems are proprietary and difficult to integrate with, for example. “You need a separate server because our application isn't allowed to live on the same server as these. Software plus servers plus training plus rules plus set-up becomes quite expensive.”

That expense drove the industry to join forces a few years ago. Says Gordon: “Five or six years ago a number of hotel groups formed an association - the Hospitality Industry Liaison Group - specifically because of the shortage of IT skills and because there were a number of systems in the industry where economies of scale could be brought and each individual group would then not need to reinvent wheel.”

What hotels need, he points out, is bums in beds, ie, a reservation system and property management system (to manage the guest once they're there, not the aircon).

“A hotel is a hotel. You need the guest to come in, to manage him and ensure he has a great experience, that's where you get the uniqueness and the intellectual property.

We can use economies of scale in terms of building interfaces, future developments and so on.

Ugen Govender, commercial manager Gaming North, Sun International

“IT can help with these systems. GijimaAst developed a reservation hub where we manage Southern Sun, Protea and City Lodge. All reservations go through our hub. We manage those inventories and enable access to rooms. We're hooked up to the global distribution systems (GDS) like Galileo, Saber, Worldspan and Amadeus, which were originally used to manage airline inventory, but now look after hotel inventory and car hire too. So we look after hotel inventory and enable it to be accessed by the GDSs. We also manage other channels, like travel agents. Whoever comes into our system has an exact up-to-date picture of what's available, can book, and it's deducted from the inventory.”

Self-service is where it's going; it's not just industry that has access to Gijima's system, customers can book directly via a hotel's Web site. How well the industry has caught up with the changing world of online everything is a matter for debate.