Business travel is picking back up and families may be taking their first or second real vacations since the pandemic cancelled so many plans just a few years ago. To ensure that guests have the best on-site experience possible, hoteliers are increasingly looking to new technologies to make their stay more comfortable than ever. With an advanced property management systems (PMS) and integration platforms, hoteliers can increase operational and staff efficiency, but also meet changing guest expectations for a high-value but relatively low-touch experience. We looked ahead to see what changes we expect to see sweeping the hospitality industry this year.

Hotels have always been a high-touch low-tech business. Today, and into the foreseeable future, hotels are moving away from the pure ‘people serving people’ model towards a more high-tech low-touch business, and doubling down on digitalization. In the paragraphs below, I envision ways in which tech can innovate and enhance the guest experience throughout the guests’ 6 stage hotel journey: Imagine-Book-Stay-Report-Recommend-Return.

As a hotelier, you know there are many ways to define luxury. From a property’s physical space to its service culture standard, there’s no question that luxury lives in the details. But can you define a hotel as luxurious without modern, interactive technology? Perhaps luxury hotelier, Vaughn Davis, can offer some insight.

Is your hotel’s data protected? What if your hotel lost access to its data overnight? A situation like this would be more than an inconvenience, it would threaten your hotel’s operations and negatively impact your business in a myriad of ways. Loss of access to data could be the result of an on-premises system crash, which will be inconvenient, but which can be brought back into operation reasonably quickly with the help of your PMS and IT teams. The more serious threat to hoteliers is ransomware attacks, and unfortunately, thanks to their rising prevalence, should be a real concern to hoteliers.

Since early 2020, the hospitality sector has witnessed a sea change. The worldwide disruption triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic forced almost every technology company in the industry to review their portfolios, reassess their strategies and redirect resources into areas with the greatest growth potential. Some businesses became targets for opportunistic deals, while others struggled to operate in ‘new normal’ mode.