Digital technology in hospitality industry: role of information technology

The importance of technology in hospitality industry is indisputable. It thoroughly changes the way customers approaching restaurants, hotels, and leisure services.

Until early 2021, COVID19 and its variants have obsessed the global hospitality industry that hotels, casinos, events, and sport performances are the most severe victim. All the karaoke services reported a significant loss in 2020 that they are planning to change their core services in favor of leasing private space for remote workers. Another example is that most restaurants in Germany have to cancel eat-in services. Currently, the government only allows food delivery services, which significantly reduces their total revenues. 

At this time of social restriction, customer behavior tends to change in favor of highly appreciating technology. In fact, to survive the depression, many hospitality companies are deciding to upgrade infrastructure and services, which adds more technology applications. In preventing direct contact, the hospitality industry has climbed to a higher level of leveraging profoundly smart devices, IoT, and mobile apps in serving their customers.

Future of hospitality technology

According to Deloitte, COVID19 tends to be a crucial driving factor of customer behavior, which appended profoundly global activities. In number, during 2020, customers had an incentive to spend money on discretionary products instead of leisure travel activities. The budget for travel, restaurants, and entertainment had been cut down by 50%.

Additionally, instead of a decline in outdoor activities, customers currently raise their budget for mobile devices and home entertainment devices at an increasing rate of 30%. In terms of hospitality, travel restriction is reported to extend in several countries leading to delay in business recovery. Experts believe that it needs three years for travel and tourism to restore as normal. At this time, companies should consider dramatic digital transformation in operation.

Digital technology in hospitality industry

During lockdown periods, the world is comprehensive understand the role of adopting digital technology, especially in hospitality industry. For deterring the pandemic from spreading, digital channels are saviors in keeping communication and entertainment. In fact, several novel forms of travel and tourism are developed to replace the traditional approaches.  

1. Online customer touchpoint: in fact, moving customer touchpoint online refers to not a novel idea that many supermarkets, cloud kitchen concept, or even Casino are planning to develop a self-service option to customers. In Europe, customers are gradually familiar with click-and-collect stores that no need cashiers or real human staff. In America, the raise of UberEATS pose disruption in the restaurant sector that on-demand food delivery. Hotel owners currently consider mobile app development to manage their properties and provide customers mobile check-ins and smart keys. Unfortunately, many businesses afraid that online touchpoint would reduce the customer experience, which is crucial in the hospitality industry 
2. Leveraging Agile process: the global uncertainty force companies to reconstruct the staffing plan that they need options to deal with change in the global market. Workforce cutdown might not be a good idea that leads to a lack of talents in the future. Many companies decide to reassign staff to other roles. However, in implementing this strategy, companies have to face management issues. Flexible contract or Agile management tends to be an effective solution in instant response to uncertainty. In the future, businesses would be ready for the wave of remote workers with thoroughly flexible working time. The difficulties in contractor management give rise to the short-term recruitment demand. Accordingly, it is believed to challenges the labor market in the future. 
3. Hotel integration: the idea of transforming the hotel into a huge machine might not be impossible recently with the development of IoT and smart devices. Currently, the property management system (PMS) deeply applying in helping hospitality businesses control the internal hotel operation. Hotel guests could instantly fill their profiles with historical data without additional time-wasting. Some modern hotels recently allow using voice control inside their room. In the future, PMS integrated AI is expected to create custom room designs that fit each customer’s hobby. Throughout the system, any occurred within the hotel would be reported to the central system. 

New technology in hospitality industry

Instead of profits, the fundamental driving force to do business in the global market refers to respect for the health and safety guideline. The hospitality industry is not alone that besides improving customer experiences, they also responsible for protecting customer health.

When lockdown eases, both public and private sectors need to detect instantly ill people by application technology in hospitality industry. As a result, the predictions would prevent the re-outbreak of the disease. In this case, non-invasive thermal scanning technology is leveraging to stop potentially ill individuals before they enter hospitality properties, including hotels, restaurants, casinos, and sports venues.

Macao tends to be a leading country that broadly applied this technology in airports and leisure travel places. Unfortunately, due to the under mature of scanning technology, many countries express their suspicion regarding its mass surveillance.

Mobile apps in smartphone integrated with smart health devices, on the other hand, is another efficient technology software solutions to the hospitality industry. With the contact-tracing mobile app development, the devices will screen data to describe an individual health risk by color code. For monitoring customers, hospitality businesses could use it to seek customers with potential infection. 

Future of hospitality software development services

Apart from customer screening technology before entry, hospitality software development services also develop solutions for keeping the property entirely safe.

Cleansing performance is believed to take a significant part in the hotel sector, which affects both customer satisfaction and health. Especially when COVID19 lies on the surface, hotels need to focus more on surface cleansing in properties. The UV light tends to be the future that applying in keeping sanitation of guest keys and staff devices. Apart from that, the cleansing process would be fully automated by planning and scheduling in the central system. Besides, drones, robots, and other forms of autonomous delivery are expected to replace the traditional mean of transformation.

Additionally, in this decade, the hospitality industry needs to adopt custom symptom monitoring solutions, known as a digital platform for online connecting the whole ecosystem. Expressly, the platform would contain and store personal factors, roles, and systems. Whereas businesses could do a risk assessment to deter disruption in the workplace. Obviously, the platform might suffer significant challenges regarding personal privacy rights that need the government to handover.

In conclusion, digital technology in hospitality industry is expected key for business recovery. However, at this time, companies need to get ready to thoroughly transforms in hospitality ecosystem.