The Upsurge of Digital Disruption in Hospitality Management
Brand new strategies and upbeat initiatives are imperative to keep rapid pace in the competitive world. It keeps businesses differentiated and help them meet today’s unique and complex consumer expectations in an increasingly buyer-driven market.
Competitive forces are driving force behind the innovation and modern offerings in order to enhance the overall brand equity. Talking about the hospitality industry, form this point on, hoteliers will need to work on many fronts at once. They need to build analytics capabilities, keep up with advances in mobility and leverage existing touch point channels where they can apply technology strategically to create a differentiated customer experiences.
Technology will be at the forefront for delivering the tailored and personalized experience to customers. It is the key to managing a guest’s experience across each stage of their visit; right from the moment that a guest plans a trip to when they check in, soon after they are on the property, when they check out, and after they have walked out the door.
More than a shift from management of the room, the current scenario is about the development of the total guest experience. Businesses should focus more on creating experiences for their customers.
This total shift enables hoteliers to capture guests entire revenue potential and not just room revenue. Technology plays a key role to help them better manage operations and maximizing overall performance.
These trends will continue as technology becomes more sophisticated. Customers expect to use mobile devices to interact with products or services in new ways; employees look for mobile solutions to improve their productivity. Hoteliers will need to address mobility holistically to determine ways to effectively integrate both guest and employee demands into their enterprise architecture and across the guest life cycle.
Mobility solutions at different points across the guest life cycle can prove beneficial for hospitality. There are majority of hotels who want to incorporate guest-facing mobile apps for check-in and on-property experience management.
They are also tying up with an iOS or Android app development company to come up with mobile apps enabling users to search and explore hotels using location-based technology. They also provide the ability to book/modify their reservations through apps.
How can hoteliers leverage mobility?
Many hoteliers can gain additional value and lower their operating costs simply by adopting mobile based technology solutions. There are a few major areas where hospitality services providers can focus to enable the guest benefits: Guest mobile applications, mobility architecture and governance, mobile couponing and loyalty, and mobile testing.
Mobility architecture
The architecture of mobility should solve the purpose of both enterprise and consumers. They should provide solutions and foster standardization of platforms and toolsets, provide consistency and reuse of enterprise services, and security.
Mobile applications for guests
In order to achieve bookings, ancillary spend, loyalty, and in some cases, on-property integration, hotel services can provide robust mobile applications as a part of hospitality IT solutions. All they need to determine is the best feature set to offer their guests via mobile applications, be it a single or multiple app solution, and examine exactly what their competitors are doing and what results they are achieving.
Mobile coupons and loyalty programs
In order to reach a guest at all points of their entire stay, business-to-guest mobility has become the new norm. Hoteliers should differentiate their loyalty program from their competitors and see how they can target their guests better throughout the life cycle of their stay.
Before providing digital coupons, hotel and lodging companies should consider how it will play into loyalty programs. And they will also need to contemplate how they will track digital coupon redemption on aspects like who is redeeming, when are they redeeming and does the coupon drive additional spend?
Conclusion
With time, as hoteliers will look forward to serve their guests with mobile capabilities, they will also need to develop solid strategies which is aimed at engaging guests across their visit life cycle in new and compelling ways. But, one should not forget that the mobility domain, presents the same challenges as the Web or other key enterprise solutions. With the penetration of platforms and integration needed with network operators, device manufacturers, business partners, and application developers, the world of mobility can be overwhelming.
