CEO: Hotels failing to keep up with pace of technology
June 30, 2010
By HMA Staff
Hotel and Motel ManagementHotels are failing to keep up with technological advances leaving guests disgruntled and leading to an unnecessary waste of resources, a leading technology expert said last week.
In a keynote speech at the one-day Hotel Technology Conference, held June 17 in Macau, Douglas C. Rice, EVP and CEO of trade association Hotel Technology Next Generation (HTNG), said in-room technologies were frequently outdated and failing to meet guests’ expectations.
“Twenty to twenty five years ago, when you visited a hotel room, you saw things you didn’t have at home and that is no longer true. People now have more at home than they have in a hotel,” he said addressing the audience of hospitality IT professionals.
“The guest room technology is antiquated versus what people now have in their home properties. [At home], people now have home networks, sophisticated telephony, environmental controls…and it’s going to get worse because homes are getting more sophisticated at a very rapid rate as [technology] prices are coming down,” he said.
Part of the problem, explained Rice, is the large number of different systems that hotels typically have and the complexity of system integration. A large hotel such as The Venetian Macau, where the event was held, can have as many as 200 different systems, which create problems for integration, Rice said.
“There are many systems to integrate and there are technologies that exist to help all this, but the skills to manage them are specialized and are very expensive. If you’re running a typical 300-room hotel, you simply cannot hire the skills that really know the technologies that help,” he said.
Problems caused by numerous systems—in areas including accounting and control, F&B, front desk, telephony—include inconsistent platforms, different operating systems, different development tools and different technical approaches, he added.
“Every hotel is different. There are probably no more than a few hotels in the world that have completely identical systems to another hotel. There is very little consistency. When you start to integrate systems and you don’t have consistency, it makes it more difficult,” he said.
The problem is exacerbated by a lack of products specific to the hospitality sector, Rice added. “You have a lot of vendors that have non hospitality specific products. Some of them [are doing] hospitality specific versions of their products and that is great, that is what our industry needs, but some of them haven’t and in many cases those interfaces are trying to make up for the fact that the systems were really designed for something other than a hotel,” he said.
Limitations in financial resources mean hotels also don’t always IT staff on board capable of resolving interoperability problems, he added. “The solution requires skill levels that are simply not practical for hotels to deploy. You can’t hire the skills you need at the pay scale you have,” Rice said.
As a result, hotels tend to shy away from upgrades and instead keep the systems that they have leading hotels to stay outmoded, he said.
“Systems are hard to support. We have a web of interconnected systems that need to talk to each other…the safest and cheapest choice for a hotel is to keep what you have and that is what a lot of hotels have done. Guest rooms have fallen behind where they need to be to meet people’s expectations,” he said.
Rice also attacked hotels for engaging staff in time-wasting activities by doing manual checks, for example, of the mini-bar when it has not been used, and said greater use of technology could be used to improve operational efficiency as well as reduce wastage of energy resources.
“Staff spend time doing the wrong things. They don’t do things based on whether it brings value to the guests. They do things based on the sheet that tells them what they are supposed to do today. Technology can help solve a lot of these issues that are wasting labour in ways that isn’t helping the hotel,” he said.
Tags: hotel technology
