For many hotels, room revenue has taken a big hit during the COVID-19 pandemic, but being able to make up for some of the shortfall with food-and-beverage sales has been a lifesaver for many properties. “Having a [point-of-sale system] that is flexible and can accommodate online and mobile ordering from not only guests, but all nonstaying guests and locals, has been key to keeping that part of the business rolling,” said Courtney Walton, senior solutions manager at Oracle Hospitality.
The silver lining within this pandemic is that guest loyalty is up for grabs, said Rohith Kori, VP, corporate and product strategy at Agilysys. A recent survey by McKinsey and Company indicated that more than 70 percent of millennials are considering new brands. This provides a unique opportunity for restaurants to build new loyalty by recognizing guests and offering a personalized experience both off and on property.
“Hotels need deliver a personalized experience by uniquely identifying a guest at all touch points of interaction and providing operators the data and tools at those points to personalize their service delivery,” Kori said.
convenience are here to stay in the post-pandemic world.
Photo credit: Agilysys
Over the past year, customers have gotten used to convenience—be that ordering from their own phone, curbside pickup or delivery. “While the industry expects a large pent-up demand for customers to start traveling and eating out, the items that have increased customer convenience are here to stay,” Kori continued. “Operators will be expected to do more with less—more service, more convenience for guests with less [capital expediture] and [operating expenditure] budgets.”
Operators will be looking forward to enterprise-level POS products that are platform agnostic and can run on various hardware devices, including consumer-grade devices, he said.
“We’ve seen hotels really get creative and innovative during this time, whether by renting out their unused F&B space as a ghost or virtual kitchen or by curating private dining experiences that allow for social distancing while still maintaining that fine-dining atmosphere,” Walton said.
There has also been a huge adoption of touchless and self-service ordering so guests can still enjoy the food they love without having to order face-to-face or touch physical menus or payment devices. When the POS platform is flexible, it is a lot easier for the property to branch out and do what it needs to do in order to stay afloat, Walton continued.
In the hospitality industry especially, the POS experts are seeing a lot of demand for integrations to third parties and other technologies. “A solid POS platform is a great foundation, but open [application programming interfaces] are integral to providing a tailored solution for each individual customer, whether it’s a hotel, casino, resort or cruise ship,” Walton said. “When APIs are made publicly available, that means that third parties or customers themselves can write integrations to any loyalty, stored value, mobile app or other technology provider that they want to have as part of their overall F&B solution.”
Walton warns that no company is going to be able to provide every functionality that a customer wants, but with flexible integration capabilities, customers can still have all of that functionality, with the POS platform at the center.
How AI is Changing POS
Many F&B operations offer mobile ordering today—guests expect to be able to at least access the restaurant menu and order online, according to Walton. “But as we see voice commands and augmented reality make their way into people’s everyday lives, we can also expect that guests are going to want the same type of convenience in their F&B experience, whether it’s being able to order food from a digital assistant or perhaps see what a meal will look like using augmented reality," she said.
As far as artificial intelligence is concerned, that type of technology has existed in the POS space for some time. The system gathers data, learns based on patterns in that data, and acts accordingly. In the kitchen, for example, it can greatly enhance operations by evaluating kitchen performance and optimizing ordering throughput by allowing more mobile or onsite orders to come in during slow periods and throttling back when the kitchen is bogged down. We have also seen interest in offering dynamic discounting and pricing that takes into account things like item popularity, restaurant traffic, and inventory.
On the consumer side, there are applications for this in the loyalty space, where the POS can learn a guest’s spending habits based on past behavior and suggest a meal it knows the guest may enjoy, or even sends them a text when they walk by a restaurant they like. But in the end, it’s all about how much information the guest wants to volunteer.