Unlocking the potential of hotel systems; a case in point
There’s a plethora of new ideas, concepts, so-called innovations and applications all vying for a piece of the travel and hospitality pie — and there’s certainly huge sums to be made by providing software to this sector.
In Europe hotel investment reached a record high of €23 billion in 2018. In the US, a decade of growth has seen hotel gross bookings grow from $116 billion to $185 billion, and airline revenues jump from $155 billion to $222 billion. Overall the sector added a record $8.8 trillion to the world’s combined GDP in 2018 — a massive 10.4% of the world’s total economic activity.
Continued technological development will drive ongoing growth, and in the last five years travel startups have received over £1 billion in new investment. The online travel market alone, for example, is expected to grow to $817 billion by 2020.
Delivering success
Yet success relies on delivering a product at the right time, with the right access and delivery of value — and this is where we have played a role in helping businesses advance their technologies to further their industry ambitions.
Sciant is often engaged to develop a proof of concept to the next stage. Stepping in for immediate knowledge and IP transfer, Sciant works with the internal development team to ensure continued development of the system or software.
Sciant’s expert travel and hospitality domain knowledge, coupled with its vast experience of industry solutions development and system interfaces, makes us an appropriate partner for new technologies. As one customer commented: “Sciant is a dedicated team of quality people with the right sector knowledge and solutions expertise. We only had positive experiences working with Sciant.”
Access to the market
When working with the hospitality market especially, new technology needs to have essential PMS/CRS hotel interfaces to ensure the right data and updates are recorded in real-time. This is particularly important when working with reservations, guest information, or hotel rates.
New tools need to recognise and understand the data required to optimise the performance of their system and to deliver the benefits the hospitality customer expects. For example one system Sciant worked on needed to recognise and display the room type for the guest while working to the hotel’s chosen parameters and connecting to the affinity programme. Reservation details needed to be retrieved, processing guests’ data to evaluate if it was applicable to the offer that was set against core criteria including days until arrival, booking source, market codes and loyalty settings. In tandem, all this data may need to be reprocessed back to the CRS/PMS in a two-way exchange.
The right connections
With this particular case the first goal was to connect with Oracle Opera PMS in order to capitalise on its large share of the USA. Depending on the market focus of the new technology platform, or type of hotel (independent/ brand/chain) it will be essential to identify which systems need direct interfaces and the quality and depth of these connections.
There are an array of ways to access APIs, and it’s important to engage with potential partners to understand the requirements to help deliver on the commercial aims of the business.
As our customer explained; “Sciant becomes a complete part of your team, they really care about the product and the delivery. Sciant codes and develops, through an innovative and cooperative process, helping to drive the development and deployment. From day one they dealt with any critical issue affecting the production they immediately found solutions to resolve them. Every Sciant team member provided immediate value on joining the team.”
The Sciant team manages the process to ensure connections are fully functioning including QA testing and integrating relevant functionality required. The development team approach the process most suited to the customer, in this particular instance scrum was used to ensure an agile process and improve accuracy and predictability.
Essential technologies
To profit from the hospitality sector, we are seeing big investment in technologies like AI, augmented and virtual reality (AR and VR), voice recognition, chatbots, the internet of things, blockchain, machine learning and big data.
It seems that VCs are looking to snap up smart, tech savvy travel startups using these new technologies to disrupt the market. But without the relevant interfaces, these technologies are just good ideas.
