Hospitality in 2018
In a few days we bid farewell to 2017, a year that has shown hotels the importance of technology in guest service.
In 2018, i envision Customer Experience to be more data and technology led across the travel industry. Some early signs of this were seen in 2017 with the rise of chatbots, travel assistants & Alexa powered hotel rooms. Though the hospitality industry has seen a rapid adoption in technology of the last 2 years the gap with what their guests expereince outside the hotel and what the hotel offers during the stay is till very wide.
Hotels will be seen shifting their attention towards a more controlled guest service operations. The first step in this direction will mean digitisation of service delivery workflows. The use of tech driven solutions to log, monitor, escalate, analyse service requests — internal or external will increase. This empowers hotels to right size service staff, room amenities distribution and store room inventory. For example, a hotel analyses the guest calls recieved for housekeping services and realises a bulk of the calls are for Extra Towels, instead of being reactive and stressing ops with these requests, a simple solution can be to change the room stocking strategy & on check-in provide more towels in the room.
Another important focus area for hotels will be the democratization of guest engagement channels. Hotels needs to respond to the guest need for choosing the channels they like to engage on. Guest can no longer be bound by the room phones or forced to download a hotel app for a few days of their stay. The hotels ability to fit into the guest’s digital lifestyle will determine digital engagement. With 250 Billion messages sent in a day, chat is prooving to be an obvious place where hotels needs to start building their presence.
