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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-Ã -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.