Hospitality technology for hotels, resorts, casinos – resilience in the 2020s
December 2, 2020
Leading hospitality organizations have risen to the occasion in a time that is marked with radical disruption, adjusting quickly to serve guests in a new paradigm. Technology has played a vital role in making sure that every location is connected so that organizations can respond to external economic forces as a single entity. They’ve done so by connecting systems in their locations and across their organization, empowering staff as a result, and enabling ways to put the power into the hands of guests while also ensuring atmospheres of welcome, calmness, and safety during their stay. Industry leaders who have invested in emerging cloud technology have had the advantage.
A cloud-based Hotel PMS that integrates easily with mobility, gaming systems, reservations solutions, and other hospitality technology has been a key to scalability for many years by now. Adoption rates have been slow, but steady. Today when the conditions affecting the industry have presented new challenges, the impetus to leave the status quo behind and evolve hospitality technology platforms to scale toward a new era will be vital mandates. What specific forces are driving cloud adoption for hotels and resorts? What role does that play to ensure resilience in the 2020s? Here are some ideas to get started.
Embracing the cloud to create organizational cohesion
Even if adoption rates around cloud for the hotels, resorts, and casinos have been slow to date in comparison to other industries, migration to cloud-based infrastructure has seemed inevitable for years. Now, with the demands to create stable and scalable systems upon which to deliver services with greater flexibility, the need for what the cloud can deliver has only accelerated in 2020. This certainly includes giving teams access to business systems via web-based interfaces as they work from home, with many people on teams doing so for the first time. It also has meant rethinking the value of business data collected in various capacities across the guest experience spectrum, often fragmented when each location holds that data in a silo.
That is the central value that organizations seek out and find in cloud infrastructure -- a more simplified way to make sure that teams, locations, departments, and efforts are unified and drawing from a single business data ecosystem. In times of disruption, this has proven to be a more resilient means of making radical changes to services and support to them in a narrower window of time. This has a significant impact on how ready an organization is to serve guests in whichever location they happen to be in. As the industry advances into the 2020s, being maneuverable, flexible, and able to weather future disruption is paramount. Cloud-based infrastructure and the location-wide support it brings is the best basis for establishing that.
Giving teams greater visibility and clarity across all locations
During disruptive times, a whole organization must act quickly in a concerted effort to respond to external conditions. The faster that teams can respond to official mandates, corporate communications, revised selling and marketing strategies, and newly implemented operational practices, the easier it is to present a redefined offering to guests and to deliver services to them in a way that makes them feel welcomed and safe. To do this, information has to be accessible and in real time, enabling teams from operations management, to IT, to service staff and location management to do their jobs more effectively.
This is another expression of how a cloud platform creates cohesion within teams across all locations. It empowers service staff via web-based tools and mobile-friendly access to monitor guest requests, manage communications, and more carefully manage and monitor housekeeping processes. It helps ensure location-wide and strict standards for cleaning guest rooms during and between stays, common areas, and all high touch surfaces. Greater and more flexible access to schedules, requests, updates, and more creates the kind of clarity that’s necessary to a completely redefined guest experience. Cloud adoption empowers staff to do what they’ve always done, but with greater clarity and efficiency.
Thriving in the present, building toward the future
Even before pandemic conditions became a reality, times had changed beyond what on-prem legacy hotel PMS solutions were able to deliver to meet emerging guest expectations. Cloud infrastructure gets locations out of their silos during times when unity and cohesion are paramount to success. Cloud-based hospitality technology platforms create an “above location” dynamic that supports all staff in all locations, increasing their visibility to real time data, enabling hotels, resorts, and casino organizations to be more flexible and maneuverable to meet the challenges of the day. Importantly, cloud-based systems help them to establish a scalable foundation to anticipate and respond to the ones to come, too.
What else do hotel, resorts, and casinos need to consider to staying resilient in the 2020s? How do organizations balance present needs with ones that are likely to emerge in the future? We’ve created an 8-point best practices guide resource that touches helps answer this question.