In the last ten years, a new technology strategy has displaced entire industries that were once deemed unstoppable.
That technology model is “The Platform.”
The likes of Uber, Airbnb, Amazon, and others have risen from the ground up and built a new infrastructure for delivering services to consumers. With technology at their core, these companies are able to receive, dispatch, monitor and analyze service requests with exceptional precision, optimizing their operations while engaging directly with and owning their consumers. They have leveraged technology to unify their end-to-end operations. By operating more effectively, they make room to create customer delight, a.k.a. hospitality, and dominate their respective industries. Their true innovation lies in the new operating models that these technology companies have delivered to their industries.
In a special report we co-authored with Skift, we take a look at the rise of platforms and how hotels can learn from this paradigm to evolve their operations.
Hotels already share lot of similarities with the platform approach, in that they bring together a multitude of services into a single guest experience. But running a hotel is difficult. Hotels are complex operations requiring the precise choreography of multiple departments acting as one to deliver consistent and impeccable service. At the same time, hotel budgets are shrinking while guests are quick to apply newly-raised expectations created by the superlative customer experience and connectivity that the platforms have enabled. This is to say nothing of the overlapping guest-to-staff messaging tools, fragmented back-end software systems and analog communication services that make delivering on these promises challenging.
With so much worry over the distribution battle with the online booking players and increasing competition from the sharing economy, it is easy to lose track of the core tenant of hospitality – providing great service. To deliver exceptional service and match today’s elevated guest demands, a hotel must have truly outstanding operations and the technology to match. The report goes on to look at the current technology make up of a hotel, offering an emerging framework of unified, open and sticky technology strategies hotels can use to evolve their operations to flourish in this new “expectation economy.”
For more, download the full report, for free, by clicking the button below:
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