Domestic and international tourist has seen many years of steady growth. The revenue generated from the accommodation, food, and nutrient, and alternative services provided to the current massive flux of travelers, has propelled the leisure and welcome business to become a key driver of the global economy.
For sustained growth of this business, experts in the field argue for major improvements in the type and quality of hospitality services to get used to the changing consumption and travel behaviors of the evolving customer base. Specifically, these improvements are targeted towards attracting the new generation of technophile members traveling on a tight budget.
Smartness through interoperability and inter connectivity of all network partners increasingly enables hospitality organizations to develop their competitiveness through a better understanding of customers and market conditions and develop their decision-making processes. Smartness can effectively develop networks to create an ecosystem and dynamically interconnect all members.
Advance technologies bring-in innovative and intelligent ways in which to manage and monitor business. The Internet of things (IoT) and the Internet of everything revolutionize and re-engineer business process as effectively disrupting the tourism and hospitality industries. Data is one of the most valuable assets in the hospitality industry.
Contemporary welcome management desires a tremendous amount of knowledge, as well as internal massive knowledge (such as building reservation history, analysis, guest history, revenue statistics and promoting statistics), and external context info collected from the external macro-environment like economic, political and environmental data as well as nearby event profiles to conducting comprehensive business analysis.
Big data collected from both internal and external services help hospitality practitioners to put historical databases to forecast and predict business trends usages such as occupancy, rates and yield, labor costs and investment decisions.
However, current big data is still spread around the Internet without a standardized format. Therefore, users have difficulties to retrieve and consolidate them in a meaningful manner.
Hospitality industry consists of countless direct and indirect business partners and collaborators. Every member of the network has comprehensive and elaborate knowledge to complement their business analysis. However, no value can be created without these data is accessible, analyzed and support decision making.
With the support of big data, cloud service, sensors and ambient ecosystems can collect data dynamically, and decision support systems to support business functions in order to maximize the value for all stakeholders and intelligence. This will enable all actors to develop the collective competitiveness of the entire hospitality ecosystem and co-create value for all stakeholders.
Guests expect hotels to provide effective IOT applications for daily itinerary planning, information search, and for locating nearby activities. Communicating access voice, data and face-to-face hotel guest expect instant gratification as well as an understanding of their personal desire and circumstances against the range of contextual factors, towards maximizing value.
The impact of IOTs in hotel management is mainly reflected in four major areas: strategic planning and revenue management; operations; marketing distribution and communication; and customer service plus relationship management.
An inter connectivity and interoperability framework is being spread throughout hospitality as an intelligence system that will revolutionize the hospitality industry.
A fully integrated smart network should be able to sense, store, analyze and interpret data dynamically. From the capability of IoT and sensors, data from an external environment can be monitored and extracted.
To bring in smartness to the hospitality ecosystem, a common platform on the cloud must be set up to enable data communication among applications. Dynamic data can be interchangeable and all stakeholders should be able to obtain the required data for business forecasting and strategic planning.
Handling big data warehouses requires business intelligent systems which able to extract, transform and analysis blended data from internal and external sources.
A good example in hospitality is STR which collects data from independent hotels, aggregates data and enable subscribers to undertake strategic destination analysis and benchmarking against their anonymous competitors. In addition, contextual information such as weather forecast, events information annual celebration can assist hotelier in their decision making.
Smartness in hospitality supports the internal integration of operational data as well as the interoperability and inter connectivity with other shareholders in the ecosystem. It enables hotels to constantly exchange information throughout their value system and adapts their operation and strategies accordingly. Guests are in the center of the process as dynamic interaction support personalization and contextualization of service and co-creation of experiences.
Technology in hospitality not only acts as tools to improve operational efficiency and effectiveness but also co-create customer experiences, improve organizational performance, and leak marketing information.
low building guest to move in-room facilities via beacons and sensors. These systems can process internal data via sensors, such as guest location inside the room and then adjust the room environmental aspects such as temperature and luminance to improve stay comfortableness.
Increasingly, interaction with external information such as the weather at the hotel location and road traffic situation can improve even more the value co-created. Automated hotel operations with a collaborative international and external marketing strategy can co-create a holistic and coherent experience to hotel guest.
