NEW YORK—While the HX and BDNY trade shows returned to the Jacob Javits Convention Center on New York City’s west side in mid-November, a group of hospitality and technology professionals gathered in Times Square for an executive roundtable on the intersection of hospitality and technology.
The roundtable, presented by Questex Hospitality (parent company of Hotel Management) and sponsored by Sabre, was titled “Property Management: How Hotel Operations Technology Enhances the Guest Experience.” The panelists were Brian Wogernese, president and CEO, Cobblestone Hotels; Sarah Dinger, EVP, brand management, My Place Hotels; Kathryn Barrett, VP of revenue management, Dream Hotel Group; Robert Arnold, president, Vizergy; Chris Guimbellot, president, Hospitality International; and Niki Stone, VP, product management, Sabre.
The topics ranged from new guest expectations to growing demand from hoteliers for simple systems that work together to share information across properties in a portfolio or brand.
Technology and Guest Decisions
“The last 18 months have ... provided us an opportunity to reset expectations,” Dinger said as the roundtable began. The time gave the team “an opportunity to take a step back” and focus on the basics of “clean, comfortable and flexible accommodations.” Online reviews are playing a bigger role in guest decisions on where to stay, she said, while perks and amenities like complimentary breakfasts, pools and spas are declining in importance.
Barrett noted that guests have a higher expectation for communication and information from their hotels, particularly as restrictions and mandates limit what features may be available to them on-site or at the overall destination. “They're looking for guidance during that discovery phase,” she said. “They are also expecting quick responses when they're reaching out [with] questions. They want you to engage—and that's across all channels: your direct channels, your [online travel agency] channels. There's a high expectation for communication.”
Technology and Labor
The ever-increasing role of various technologies in hotel operations is shifting the way managers oversee their properties—and even who they need on staff, Arnold noted. “The folks that used to be responsible for maximizing those technologies, in many cases, are no longer there,” he said. “So you're forced to do more with less and make heads or tails of all of this stuff.” He offered sympathy to the hotel company representatives at the table, noting the challenges they face in making their tech investments pay off. “Those are highly technical roles, they require fairly high acumen, and you guys are having to figure out how to make it work for you.”
Guimbellot lamented the growing trend of hotels using COVID as an excuse to cut services, and Wogernese agreed that the combination of government restrictions, mandates, the labor crunch and new technology options are changing the guest experience. “We used to clean the room every day. Now you're not able to do that. But the labor shortage has kind of forced us into that,” Wogernese said. Guests were initially sympathetic to the limitations under which hoteliers had to operate—with no roomservice, housekeeping or towel delivery—but online reviews suggest that the goodwill may be waning. With the labor shortage making certain services inaccessible, technology can be an answer to the challenge. “We're looking at several solutions to try to it's not going to eliminate our labor but it will assist the labor that's there so they can multitask with other things," according to Wogernese.
Stone asked the attendees what types of tech-related solutions help them alleviate labor pains. “It’s all technology,” Wogernese said. Cobblestone has been considering check-in kiosks for years, and the company’s leadership is still hoping to leverage the technology to take some of the pressure off the front-desk staff. The company also is leveraging ChoiceAdvantage to try and maximize labor efficiency, with front-desk teams stepping up to help with laundry and other back-of-house responsibilities on slower nights. “We're not eliminating any labor,” he said. “We're just alleviating some of the stress on the labor staff that we have.”
Barrett said the pandemic let the leadership team at Dream Hotel Group accelerate their plans to incorporate more high-tech elements. The Dream Hollywood, for example, has installed a check-in kiosk from Canary Technologies and added Alfred as a virtual team member. “Alfred's a robot that we have there, which doesn't help the labor shortage but it allows the staff that [we] do have to focus on more meaningful tasks,” Barrett said. Alfred brings towels and other supplies to guestrooms, freeing up front-desk agents to focus on the guests in front of them. “We felt that that's a great way to support your staff that's shouldering multiple responsibilities.”
But while technology can help overworked hotel teams and give guests something to talk about on social media, Guimbellot cautioned about taking hospitality out of the hospitality industry. Apart from avoiding lengthy lines at giant resorts, he said, he goes to the front desk to check in and have a moment of human interaction with the hotel staff. “I asked [my owners] straight up, ‘How many people ask you for contactless check-in?’” The answer, he was surprised to learn, was none. “They simply weren't asking for it,” he said, estimating that mobile and contactless check-in utilization rates hover around 10 percent. While he does think there is a place for contactless technology in the guest experience, it may not be as big a driver for all guests as the industry expects, he said.
Back-of-House Tech
While guests may opt in or opt out of some kinds of technology during their hotel stays, other kinds may be invisible to them. Hoteliers have a number of options when it comes to back-of-house technology like property-management systems, revenue-management systems, booking systems and central reservation systems. But with so many programs specializing in so many different facets of the day-to-day business, hoteliers may find themselves dealing with systems that don't communicate with each other, Guimbellot said: “What a lot of us need, especially on the limited-service [side] is one vendor, one platform. Period.” Simplifying all the pieces into a cohesive whole would not only make things easier for hoteliers but would encourage operators to use technology to tackle more responsibilities around the property, he said.
Barrett agreed, noting that if a hotel’s PMS has limited data points, it will not be able to connect to other systems. “And then there's a certification of those interfaces, because security is a huge concern,” she noted. Guests, operators and owners all will want to know where crucial data is stored and be able to determine who is responsible for any data breaches.
At the same time, she said, property-management systems have “come a long way.” The company has been transitioning about half of its properties’ PMS from on-premises platforms to the cloud—a sign of the systems’ evolving quality. While companies previously have worked with dedicated programs for guest messaging or housekeeping scheduling, some PMS tools now rival the third-party solutions.
Open-source data platforms are a fairly recent addition to the industry, Arnold noted, but have helped hoteliers extract the most meaningful data and use it in other platforms. “The investment that each of these subscription services, each of these platforms, cost [hoteliers] on a day in and day out basis—to not be able to get their full value has to be incredibly frustrating,” he said. “But we're getting closer to a point that we all play nice together.”
Dinger noted that the flexibility a good property-management system can provide can change the overall landscape at a hotel. “Having a PMS system that is accessible through tablets and mobile [and other technology] really changes the way that the operators can use it,” she said. Not only can team members quickly make changes for guests already on-property or for future reservations, general managers now can oversee the property from anywhere. “They no longer have to be behind the front desk or in the four walls of their office,” she noted. Instead, managers can be out on the grounds, meeting with team members or spending time in the community.
Guimbellot recalled a recent stay at a hotel in which the cloud-based reservation system still required manually cutting and pasting guest preferences from one reservation to the next. “It goes back to the whole silo thing,” he said. Siloed rate strategies and customer relationship management information limit what hoteliers know about their properties and about their guests. “Can't we simply get a system that, every time the same guest books at any of the hotels across the system, simply says ‘he likes soft pillows’?” he asked the table. “The point of our business is hospitality, and we want to take care of our guests ... before they arrive and—most importantly—while they're on property, and I feel like there are still very simple things that our systems can't do.”
From the vendor perspective, Stone agreed that there is a “huge appetite” among hoteliers for platforms that can communicate with one another and that there is still “quite a bit of friction” among the CRS, PMS, CRM software and revenue-management systems. “And if you're using all four of those, which ones work in the most frictionless way?” she asked. And while the technology and hospitality industries look to make platforms cooperate—or at least communicate—the question of who owns what data is still up in the air. “It's probably the next problem to solve,” she said.