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Circling the square at The Hospitality Show
Nevaya’s Kevin Edwards reports on the sector’s evolving relationship with technology.
The hotel sector has had a difficult relationship with technology, but it’s starting to come together now, sort of. While I was waiting in an endless snaking queue to enjoy my seamless check-in experience in my Las Vegas hotel, I had time to contemplate how the technology is there, the appetite from investors is there, and yet there I still was, rummaging for the ID and credit card I had already uploaded online.
Why was I still standing there, enjoying the timeless friction of check-in, which unites us all? Maybe the problem is less about the product and the appetite and more about the capability to execute a plan and tie it back to the success metrics.
The event itself suggested that those on stage had at least been listening to those in the queue. Hyatt Hotels Corporation’s Mark Hoplamazian waxed lyrical about making the team member interface easier, hitting his stride about the importance of technology removing the image of guests speaking to the bowed foreheads of front desk staff stroking their keyboards. But when speaking to people in the field that use the systems, the frustrations are still there. It’s still far from three clicks.
We are seeing more of a split between how technology is being used in the guest experience, with the select service model looking to enforce behaviour through technology, whereas the upscale was using it to enable choice. Isn’t that the core of hospitality, giving the guest what they want? It depends how much you’re paying.
Using technology to help reduce the number of foreheads you need behind the front desk was a pressing concern for all. We heard about one employer who has invested in the recruitment process, utilising WhatsApp for the application process in the hope of attracting younger team members.
As we have seen elsewhere in the workplace, appetite for flexibility was driving people’s choices about where to work. Aimbridge offered the chance to swap shifts to any hotel in the portfolio (within one region), making for a varied and adaptable job.
What remains an important point to emphasise is that most technology companies are looking at how to reduce the amount of human time spent on tasks to solve the recruitment process, when in fact that can never solve the problem. A smorgasbord of solutions must be blended instead. And one of those should be paying people more.
The drive to the cloud continues. Loews Hotels & Co highlighted its ambition of having zero servers on-site, something we have championed with the launch of NevayaOne, which means great TV services, but no room full of black boxes confusing those employees who should be bent over the front desk.
AI was, of course, the main topic of conversation, after ChatGPT caught everyone’s imagination earlier this year. Predominantly, hotels imagined it would allow them to cut staffing. In most cases the savvy hotels have been using AI for some time in the form of, for example, machine learning. I acknowledge that there are some brands doing some great things, but let’s keep the AI bubble as a future aspiration and focus on building the technology blocks first.