There has been a skilled workforce shortage across all industries in the past few years, and nowhere has been a harder hit than the hospitality industry. A recent survey of 200 hotels conducted by the American Hotel & Lodging Association revealed that 87 percent of hotels in the United States do not have enough staff. Where employees would have previously learned the ins and outs of a hotel’s operations over the course of years and pass that industrial knowledge down to new staff, that opportunity might not exist any longer. Ultimately this makes it more difficult for staff to provide an exceptional guest experience. Thankfully, technology can help alleviate that burden.
Unified hospitality platforms that integrate automation and artificial intelligence technologies are making it easier for all aspects of hospitality, from the front desk to the back office, to streamline operations, remove redundancies, and be more efficient. Together, these new technologies ease the burden of mundane tasks for staff, allowing them to focus on providing exceptional personalized guest experiences.
A More Intuitive Future
Just as travelers desire a high-value, low-touch experience when at a hotel, so do staff with their use of a hotel’s property management system. As new staff are hired, it is critical to be able to provide the tools and training to quickly bring them on board. This includes self-service tools, such as mobile-based applications and chatbots, to the use of onboarding videos and intelligent knowledge bases. As consumer-facing applications have enabled guests to seek out information at their own pace, hotel employees want easy access to the knowledge that empowers them to assist guests, allowing them to learn on the job without interrupting a co-worker’s tasks.
Nobody—including your employees—wants to have to repeat mundane tasks. New technologies that can help centralize billing, reservation, and reporting systems across a global hotel portfolio can help free staff to provide better on-site customer service. By minimizing the amount of mundane work, hotels, and resorts can save on their overhead costs and make a more attractive workplace for veteran employees and prospective employees alike.
Additionally, automation, in many cases driven by AI, can be applied to most front and back-office tasks. Predictive AI can help hotels determine what attributes a guest values most, at what price, and at which point in their journey they are most likely to upgrade or request services. Hoteliers who successfully integrate and leverage their data through the use of AI will be best positioned to provide unparalleled guest experiences.
Alternatively, gamification—the use of game design elements in non-game contexts—can be another quill in the arsenal for attracting new employees and retaining the workforce you already have. With familiar social media design elements, gamification can help engage your staff and bring an element of fun to what could be dull, everyday activities, while also providing leaderboards that serve as a natural place to celebrate and reward employees for meeting specific milestones and accomplishing certain goals.
The Sensible Investment Moving Forward
For some hoteliers, investing in a cloud-based unified hospitality platform wasn’t always at the top of the priority list. But the need to evolve away from rigid and siloed business models and instead focus on implementing new technologies that can help brands adapt to evolving guest expectations have become “must-haves.”
These unified platforms bring together the front and back office, including reservations, sales and event management, loyalty, finance, housekeeping, food & beverage, etc. Being able to manage all these various divisions of a hotel through a unified system is key and can also impact staff productivity. This becomes even more important as hotel staff are being asked more than ever to fill multiple roles and job activities on the property.
The unified platforms, which are open to third-party integrations, have helped hoteliers personalize the guest experience, maximize profitability, and encourage loyalty. Previously, where hotels would only have a handful of integrations to choose from, now countless new plugins are being added to property management system marketplaces on a consistent basis.
These integrations can handle any number of everyday tasks, from scanning guest passports and ID cards, as well as automatically suggesting common upsell offerings such as reserving a poolside cabana or a tennis court right from a brand’s mobile app. With these capabilities, hotels and resorts can easily implement new innovative solutions to revolutionize the experience for guests and employees alike. All of this makes a hotel better for its guests, sure, but it also makes onboarding new staff easier, too.
As you can see in the news every day, the technological capabilities and possibilities of automation and AI are set to revolutionize every industry. The hospitality industry is no different. With a cloud-based unified hospitality platform that allows for self-service open integrations, hoteliers can enhance the guest experience and offer a more welcoming environment for new hires and existing employees simultaneously.
Laura Calin is the vice president of strategy and solutions management for Oracle Hospitality.