The Millennial Hotelier is fuelling the need for Universal APIs
Building a universal API for the hospitality industry is hard.
Really, really hard. If you don’t believe me, you should take a look at our Development Team’s Slack channel (although some of the phrasing used isn’t for the faint-hearted).
It’s such a difficult process that, in the weeks leading up to the launch of Impala Version 2, one of the questions I was most commonly asked by those in the know was simply: “Why are you doing this to yourselves?”
We’ve been answering that question a lot recently and that the benefits of simple, secure PMS data integration for hospitality bookings, rates, extras, guests, billing etc. are, happily, becoming much more common knowledge.
As such, a much more interesting question than “why bother?” that I would like to address is “why now?”
Hotel Tech for the Snapchat Generation
Impala is a young company, in every sense of the word. At time of writing, our workforce is almost exclusively in their twenties. As a result, we are used to having the power to update.
Our generation has grown up with constant refinements, improvements and advancements in tech services, from downloading a bug-fixing iOS with the tap of a screen to unlocking more Tinder matches with a simple refresh.
As such, the Millennial Hotelier is a very different breed to previous generations of hospitality professionals. They want ‘best-in-class’ not just ‘the one that covers the most bases’. When every aspect of personal connectivity has been in a constant state of refinement across your entire adult life, a professional landscape without the same level of optimisation becomes a source of tangible frustration.
So when third party apps and services that would make your life significantly easier are closed-off to you due to a lack of swift, simple, secure PMS integration, Millennial Hoteliers are less inclined to write this off as ‘unfortunate’. As are we.
Adapt or Die
The reason that a universal API is needed now is because people that grew up with Snapchat are now the Assistant GMs at hotels. They want software that works as hard as it can and that can be improved in real-time.
In creating and developing Impala’s universal hospitality API, we endeavour to facilitate technically what their rise to C-suite positions facilitates institutionally. As 25–35 year-olds continue to climb the ranks of hospitality and take up more and more true positions of power, the scope for implementation and growth for third parties will increase with them. I mean, how long do we really think it’s going to be before people who don’t remember dial-up internet are running tech stacks at the biggest hotels in the world?
Will the traditional ‘such is life’ approach survive? For a time, maybe. I mean, it isn’t as if nobody remembers Outlook or that Match.com is on the verge of going under.
However, as new voices enter conversations at the top table, I can’t help but think that progress and evolution become inevitable.
Just as we are all beginning to receive invites to the first raft of Tinder and Bumble weddings and text messaging seems as old fashioned as cave painting, times are changing. That’s why we needed to act now.
The power in hospitality is shifting. It’s time for tech to catch up.
