The evolution of the hospitality industry depends on input from a lot of different voices—not only from the leaders who are front and center guiding us today, but also from those who are studying to become future hospitality leaders and who are just beginning or will soon be ready to begin their professional journeys. At HFTP, we strive to represent all the different voices that will lead to advancements in the hospitality industry, including students in the Master of Science in Global Hospitality Business program at EHL, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and the University of Houston.
Each semester since spring 2020, we have hosted a competition project in which the students conduct industry research and publish a blog post of their findings. The top three winning blog posts are then published to HFTP’s official blog site, HFTP Connect. Many students choose this opportunity to explore fascinating trends in hospitality technology, such how blockchain can be used to track high-quality wine or address the plastic crisis, or how live streaming can be used to help in hotel business recovery.
The most recent first-place blog post from Xuanying (Charlene) Ren explored how a universal hospitality booking engine can be used to extend the customer journey experience. Read an excerpt from her research below. We also invite you to read all of the winning blog posts at blog.hftp.org.
New Areas of Implementation of Technology in the Hospitality Industry: An Excerpt
By Xuanying (Charlene) Ren
Think about a full-service hotel in a city’s downtown area: It has hundreds of rooms, few conference rooms, one grand ballroom, a spa, a fitness center and five restaurants. The hotel now has separate reservation systems for the front office, food and beverage, sales and spa departments for guests to book their reservations. Therefore, guests need to find each department separately if they want to modify information regarding the booking. That is why a UBE is needed for future hospitality development.
UBE is a channel-agnostic platform which makes it work similarly across all channels to the market. These channels include web, mobile, messaging, and voice, as these are all potential reservation means in the future for guests to make bookings. In addition, UBE should be an omni platform for all inventories sold in the hotel—not limited to guest rooms, food and beverage, spa, fitness, conferences and transportation. With the interrelated information across the departments, hotel staff can share all inventory reservations made by each individual guest to learn his or her preference about the hotel facilities. Hence, hotels can learn what are the most popular combinations and put forward the package accordingly. Moreover, with the omni platform, it would save much of guests’ time since they could make changes with all reservations on a one-stop reservation platform. Lastly, a UBE should be operated in two faces: one for guests to make self-service bookings, and one for the hotel reservation department to modify any changes on behalf of guests. This ensures customization and flexibility for guests, as well as efficiency whenever they encounter problems which can be solved by the hotels.
With a UBE, the touchpoints can be extended to the stay and post-stay periods. The platform allows the guests to be flexible to change their reservations during the stay and leave reviews after the stay. Hence, full potential is seen for UBE to be developed and implemented in the future to further improve the guest experience.
Frank Wolfe is the CEO of Hospitality Financial and Technology Professionals (HFTP).