EXPERT SPEAK: Amit Kanchan Information Systems Manager, Hyatt, Delhi 

IT impregnation in the hospitality industry has been so intense that it could

be re-christened e-hospitality. From visiting a specific location to choosing a

hotel, you use IT tools that work over the Internet. Or just pick and dial

toll-free numbers, which work over a combined voice/data pipe, and land up to a

call center executive in a different part of the world. The operator sitting in

that location not only informs you about the various hotels (properties)

available, but also confirms the room availability in any part of the world; or

if you are a regular then you simply mention your customer ID and the operator

will tell you about your preferences, in terms of choice of room

(smoking/non-smoking), meals, etc. All this is possible because the call center

has a CRM deployment that has already recorded all information about your

earlier visits, and a reservation system that sees the status of all hotels

across the world.

For any systems provider to understand the criticality of a hotel operation

vis-à-vis other service industries such as financial institutions, or any

other, is not as simple as a duck taking to water. To make them understand the

need of 100 percent uptime, and that there is no off day/hour for a hotel and

any patch/upgrade has to be done online is not an easy task. This is the biggest

IT concern of this industry.

The average rates of any service industry, be it hotels or airlines, have

plummeted due to the market recession in the recent past, and to deal with this

is a challenge currently faced by the industry. To cope with this, it has

reinforced IT tools such as Optims, Cognos, Serenata and Ideas, to name a few,

that aid in controlling the average rates and rate of the day. These tools

assist in meticulous revenue management, yield management and data warehousing.

When we talk about the hospitality industry, reservation systems and

customer-relation management are the two core areas that have benefited the most

from IT implementations. For instance, with just a phone call today, a

reservation operator can browse for availability, rates and packages for various

hotels in their respective chain and confirm booking as well. Customer-relation

management is the need of the hour and almost every chain of hotels has a

centralized reservation system.



Even though the hospitality sector is not a manufacturing unit like that of a
BMW or Boeing and so it does not need a super supply-chain management tool, but

still one can find hotels with just-in-time and total productive maintenance

processes in place. 

Also, since the hotel industry is not an IT company and any new technology

cannot be harnessed just because it has arrived, to adhere to the mantra of

'harness new technology which assists in faster business making decisions and

reduce the cost of doing business' is always a big task.

If, besides other things, we can manage our time well, since wasted time

cannot be recycled, and fasten our processes, such as the food preparation,

check-ins and checkouts, then this will surely aid in boosting the industry's

growth further.