Tuesday 29 January 2013

The Challenges of Delivering a Networked Hospitality Experience – Part1: PMS


At the recent Hotel Technology Conference in Singapore one of the topics discussed was the wisdom of putting devices into hotel rooms. A good question, given the fact that the average traveler tends to be accompanied by more than just one connected device. Wouldn’t it be easier to utilise the guest’s devices with downloadable apps and the like, rather than go to the expense of bulk buying expensive hard ware that may be outdated within 12 months?

The instinctive answer may be ‘yes’, but whether you rely on guests’ own devices or decide to put devices or technologies in the room for guest use, the key for designing a successful service in both cases comes down to how easily those technologies and services can be used and how effective they can be managed.
Unfortunately there is not one single provider that can take care of every technology requirement in a hotel. Within a hotel’s technology belly there are at any given time a number of different systems, protocols and versions trying to play with each other, which makes incorporating various new technologies to enhance the guest experience and a unified approach to interface and service workflow difficult.

The check-in process:
still unchanged & tedious
One of the main culprits seems to be PMS. The ideal of the PMS as the “master mind” of a hotel that manages everything from front desk, equipment, maintenance and guest preferences through a single piece of software is increasingly hard to find. Many PMS’ are lagging behind the ever faster spinning guest tech curve, which results in the dissonance in providing a smooth and unified approach when managing these devices and services in hotels, even in newly built properties. Case in point: the check-in process, which remains largely unchanged – and tedious.

While you can read that the hottest PMS trends currently are mobile optimisation for management and guest-facing systems, given that we are now in year 6 of the iPhone and year three of the iPad – which arguably kicked off our current smart device revolution – this seems hopelessly late.

Enter the Cloud
To overcome the barrier to creating a highly integrated hospitality environment, convergence of all subsystems in the private or public Cloud may be the only way forward, particularly if we are talking about fixed or mobile guest device management.

While the debate is still ongoing in the hospitality industry whether cloud services provide sufficient control, security and connectivity, as an ex telco-person it is clear to me that there is no better way of managing critical data efficiently than in the cloud (see here a good article on the benefits of the Cloud for hospitality).  
From the perspective of guest device management, the most important benefits are a unified management interface, ease of systems updates and lower Total Cost of Ownership.

But what the Cloud doesn’t automatically deliver is improved hospitality services. This still depends on the functionality of the PMS, regardless of whether it’s running from the Cloud or not.

Kiva robots in action
(image courtesy of Kiva Systems)
A good example – albeit outside the hospitality industry - of how a unified technology ecosystem can make a difference is the story of Kiva Systems, a supply-chain robot-maker which was bought by Amazon last year for $775 million. Kiva is a highly integrated system that uses robots to retrieve and carry entire shelf-units of packages to appropriate shipping points. There is a great article here that explains how Kiva is an integral part of the migration into Cloud computing by connecting the virtual world to the physical world. It’s a great example of what true convergence should look like and I hope we will see similar initiatives in the hospitality technology space soon.