Tech Talk

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Merging High Tech With High Touch to Create a New Hospitality Paradigm
Posted: 03/23/2023

One of the key challenges facing today’s hoteliers is that of high tech vs high touch. Does technology conflict with personalized service? Is it possible to offer both during the same visit? And can hotels that utilize technology in favor of human interaction achieve guest loyalty?

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.

Long-term readers of this blog know that I rarely focus on a single company or product. My goal is to help readers understand new and emerging technologies, when and why they might be useful, and what to consider if you are buying them.

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The Future of Hotels
Posted: 02/21/2023

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.

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Definitely Doug 2/10/23: Planning for June
Posted: 02/10/2023

The question I have heard most often in recent months is “where are you going in the last week of June?”. As most readers are aware, two trade shows featuring hotel technology are scheduled during the same dates that week. Many of you are still undecided which to attend. Knowing that your decision will be based at least in part on where others are going (hoteliers and exhibitors both), I decided to try to get some real data that I could share.

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Post-HITEC 2018 Takeaways – The Data Challenge and Innovation

07/17/2018 Tagged as: Data Protection, Entrepreneur 20x, HITEC 2018

by James Lingle

I think this has been my favorite HITEC in a while. Don’t get me wrong – HITEC is always a great experience, and I think there is plenty to walk away with every year. Some things you always get from HITEC – plenty of networking, a full show floor and great educational sessions. This year, there were a couple of things that stuck with me more than others.

DATA

The first of those is data. We live in the age of data and honestly, we have for a while. While watching the pitches for Entrepreneur 20X, I heard the judges ask a lot about the ability to get data from the system. Some of the vendors were, surprisingly, behind the curve. I would have expected a few of them to be more prepared about the types of data they can extract and how that data might be able to be used.

I started wondering – do we really have the ability to use data the way we need to? I think in many cases we are still too far away for the average hotel or management company to effectively use all of the data available to them. Here’s why:

Brands have the advantage. This is a sheer scale issue. Brands today have more resources than any average hotel or management company maybe ever will. The smart ones are already leveraging that today.

Too many disparate flows of data. The challenge for the average hotel is getting all of its data from disparate sources into the single engine built to help them drive their business.

Focusing on limited data streams and metrics. Because of the lack of resources (people and products) we decide to only focus on a select few metrics (financial, sales, etc.) and often fail to consider other potentially valuable metrics such as website and booking behaviors, customer travel patterns or current trends.

The lack of vendors and affordable products to bridge the gap. One of the biggest problems with data is the sheer amount necessary to come to valuable conclusions. Simply put, the size of the sample has to be large enough to give true predictive information. Most products that do data analysis are simply not viable for organizations that aren’t the size and scale of major brands. While there are companies that can provide you with plenty of data analysis, there are usually three major challenges:

It is so focused as to only be use in very specific scenarios.
It is so broad that it can’t be reasonably applied to the organization.
The pool of data contains too much information from areas that aren’t relevant.

I suppose the next question is – so what is the solution?
The truth of the matter is that I am not sure I can provide that. I have plenty of opinions and some of them might even be good ideas! I think if there is a way that the smart people can solve the issue the aggregation of data and the relevance of data, that might be the first step. As with any “new” solution, once the maturity level is reached, it should become viable for a larger market.

INNOVATION

The second HITEC thing that stuck with me this year was innovation. It is hard not to be inspired by Entrepreneur 20X competition. The forward thinking about ideas to engage our guests, inspire our teams and yes, even solve our problems (whether we know they exist or not!) should excite us to push forward and to think about things in different ways. I am a linear person and the thought that these teams and their ideas can make me think outside my box is refreshing.

Here is the thing about innovation – it takes time to become a solution that works. Check out my HITEC blog for HFTP that discusses the technology hype life cycle here - http://blog.hftp.org/for-everything-there-is-a-season/. From an innovation perspective, I want to leave you with the following thought from the blog post:

“Here is where I think a great opportunity lies. Not necessarily to do all of those things that we don’t do during the expectation phase (we should get better at it), but to let the expectation phase sweep us away just a little bit. I think the expectation phase is our opportunity to challenge our way of doing business. It is our white space, our time to not just think about what we have to get done or what we have to accomplish, but to innovate.”

About The Author

James Lingle
Associate Principal
Network Technologies, Inc.

For more than 20 years, James Lingle has been a part of technology in the hospitality space. He can be reached at james@jameslingle.com. Lingle is also a member of the DANNI Team.