It is March 2020, and things are getting serious. Airlines are being grounded, travel restrictions are imposed, countries are locking down, and hospitality (like many other industries) is forced to close its doors. This did not mean we stopped working though, and there was a desperate scramble to pivot from the traditional way of doing things. Instead, we shifted to enabling a remote workforce – but for how long?
If you had not already started down the path towards cloud services, the coronavirus pandemic was certainly the opportune moment to do it. However, I think most companies were already moving to the cloud whether they intended to or not. It could have been a well-planned strategy, a five-year plan that consciously decides and proudly says with a fist in the air, “We will be cloud-first”. Alternatively, it could have been a natural evolution driven more by vendors offering their services as ‘cloud-only’. We also need to explore how this happens under different parameters: a) infrastructure and security, b) enterprise platforms and c) hospitality applications.
Infrastructure and security
Remote working could have been accommodated as an occasional occurrence with the correct infrastructure in place. You could probably connect to email easily and access services on the corporate network with a VPN. This was designed with the intention that, in the next few days or weeks, you would be going back into the office and, once on the company network, happily getting your Windows security updates and resetting your password that had expired.
However, following a number of lockdowns, months went by with people working remotely and new ways to manage and monitor all these employees working from home was needed. IT departments did not know if the computers were getting patched, or if passwords were expiring and could not be easily reset. At the same time, VPNs increasingly became more of a risk than a security as the bad guys figured out how to use this as an attractive attack vector when everyone was working from home.
This was a golden moment for cloud infrastructure services to make their appearance and accelerate their deployment. Microsoft’s Azure Active Directory (in the cloud) offered a way to manage company devices that were not on corporate networks anymore, and its Virtual Desktop gave a cloud-based alternative to VPNs.
These may have been short-term, reactionary options to solve an immediate need, but the long-term benefits are real. Deploying these cloud services offered flexibility and mobility in a way that was not possible before, without compromising on security. In fact, once you coupled this with a cloud-based multifactor authentication (MFA), you were actually increasing your security posture.
Enterprise platforms
So, we tackled the infrastructure and security aspect with cloud – but what about the enterprise platforms you still needed to access during travel restrictions? Not so easy and not so fast.
These platforms are big, lumbering giants of things like enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), omnichannel in call centres, or productivity and collaboration platforms. Changing these required a lot of planning from a lot of departments, a healthy budget and a generous portion of buy-in.
Let us focus on call centres for a moment. If your call centre was not already cloud-enabled, your agents were essentially tethered to the office, they needed access to the corporate network for the local telephone system and access to reservations and property management systems. This made for a complicated situation when remote work became a requirement, even if most of the calls were for cancellations instead of reservations.
Again, this was the perfect moment to introduce cloud services for telephone and omnichannel, and free your agents so they could work anywhere with an internet connection. These cloud services could give a level of flexibility not previously possible with local platforms, so organisations could remain agile and react as the Covid-19 waves kept coming and regulations governing working from home kept changing.
Hospitality applications
Finally, we come to the hospitality applications used, not only by our associates, but also by our guests.
In the summer of 2020, some hotels were lucky enough to open their doors, amidst plenty of restrictions and new protocols in place. Enabling contactless interactions became a high priority to promote the welfare and safety of everyone in the hotel, and much of that functionality was manifested through a guest-facing mobile application. Many hotel brands already have apps, mostly built with integrated cloud-based services, but now the focus was switched to seeing how the apps could reduce direct contact between the guest, associate, and physical surfaces.
In some cases, an app could be used for remote check-in, submitting as much information as possible pre-arrival to minimise the time spent at reception. Once checked in, the app could be used as a mobile key, it could replace the remote controller of the television, and it could replace all the in-room physical collateral for digitised versions on the app.
If enabled with chat, the guest could request items from their own phone instead of using the in-room phone, and maybe they could even order room service from the app. All of these contributed to the guest having to touch fewer surfaces and reduce face-to-face interactions. Although such impersonal methods of customer interaction were not something normally promoted in hospitality, these were special times that required special solutions.
Cloud services in hospitality are here to stay
What remains to be seen is if the focus on contactless service via an app will be maintained in the long run. If this was done as a reaction to Covid-19 restrictions, what will happen now that most of those restrictions are being lifted and life returns to normal?
Here, the guest can make their voice heard and ‘vote’, and we will see what functions really get used and which ones get less engagement. Regardless, this was a good opportunity for those hotels that did not yet have a branded app to dip their toe in the water and try the experiment, all while having a good story to tell that all options were put on the table to create a safer guest journey and experience.
This shift into the cloud leads to one other very interesting outcome. Moving away from on-premises servers and applications also leads to different skill sets required from what has traditionally been called ‘IT’. Effectively managing cloud environments can place more emphasis on business traits like contract negotiation, being legally savvy, data privacy laws and service level agreements. Your greatest IT technical expert can no longer save the day by working through the night to rebuild the server for your local PMS. In the cloud, your greatest leverage will be the clauses negotiated in the contract, holding the vendor accountable to the recovery points and times haggled over during weeks of contract negotiations.
On the other hand, the cloud platforms also create a new technical need as well. For example, Microsoft and Google have learning paths for Azure and GCP to reskill our people. Kubernetes, API management, machine learning and AI are the new and exciting areas that can offer people chances to develop themselves and bring more value to the business. Instead of being an expert at hardware specifications and operating systems, new career development opportunities are created as cloud engineers and API developers.
My overall assessment of the past two years and the impact on cloud services in the hospitality industry is that it greatly accelerated cloud adoption and will have real, tangible and long-term benefits. Cloud services adoption in hospitality allow us to standardise, centralise and integrate at a pace you cannot achieve with on-premises systems. Periods of closure can very well be the best time to implement disruptive projects and take advantage of the down time if you have the funds to do so. Covid-19 really put a spotlight on hospitality technology and created a great opportunity to expedite cloud adoption – but let’s hope it does not happen again anytime soon.
How cloud solutions can enable hotel PMS
When you adopt a cloud-based hotel management system, it becomes easier to work with other cloud-based third-party solutions. For example, it can seamlessly integrate with many systems, including revenue manager, channel manager, online reputation manager, web booking engine, POS and others. This can automate processes across all departments – from the front offi ce to back of house. As a result, this allows several things hotel managers can implement, such as:
■ tweak the room rates in response to demand, supply, occupancy and competitor pricing for better RevPAR
■ distribute effi ciently on OTAs and metasearch engines for enhanced room sales and online reach
■ increase their brand’s online reputation and ratings to attract more guests
■ generate more direct booking for all properties via the website to save on OTA commission
■ manage in-house restaurants, billing, accounts, inventory and other services
Assist in serving guests
According to Hospitality Technology’s ‘2022 Lodging Technology Study’, enhancing guest room technology will be of primary importance for 45% of hoteliers in 2022. Many other trends also suggest that almost 70% of hotels plan to invest in the required technology to roll out several guest-facing amenities this year.
The list includes contactless payment, mobile reservation, mobile check-in/ out, mobile room key and mobile apps to communicate with hotel staff. Sitting at the heart of the hotel operation, a cloud-based hotel PMS can integrate with the relevant platforms as mentioned above to help stay focused on enhancing the guest experience.
Technology evolves faster due to changing market dynamics, operational necessities, guest needs and other factors. That is why hoteliers also need to embrace the right solution for their enterprise to realise faster ROI and desired business benefi ts while beating the competition. If that is the business objective, then now is the time to make that move and get on to the cloud, as it can transform the hotel business with growth and agility.
Source: Hotelogix
