As you prepare to allocate your IT spend for next year, take a minute to explore how operations acts as the backbone of the hotel guest experience.
How to Differentiate Yourself
The guest experience is where hotels are looking to invest as a differentiator heading into the future. In fact, recent research predicts that by the year 2020, the customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator. Also referenced are the top 3 values for improving the customer experience:
- improve customer retention
- improve customer satisfaction
- increase cross-selling and up-selling
[bctt tweet=”By 2020, the customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator” username=”amadeushosp”]
Improving these areas depends on the ability of your operations team to collect and respond to guest needs and requests.
IT Spend is Becoming More Operations and Guest Focused
To meet changing guest demands, hotels are looking to spend budget to deliver value in the current year. According to the 2017 Hospitality Technology Lodging Study, 2017 is forecasted to be a year of investment with only 2% of hotels saying they plan to spend less than last year and 57% planning to spend more.
With an average hospitality industry IT allocation of around 3.5% of revenue, making the right decision on where to use available funds will be essential. Based on the top 10 investment areas for technology in 2017, 29% of respondents called out servicing the guest (employee productivity) as a key priority, and 24% of hotels are searching for ways to enhance the guest experience.
Service Optimization Solutions
The Service Optimization platform (HotSOS + HotSOS Housekeeping) provided by Amadeus Hospitality, delivers a cloud-based mobile solution with 100+ supported integration partners. Staff benefit from a visual operational experience that supports 15+ native languages to help schedule, route and
execute against the guest experience.
