The first generation of apps was about directly generating revenue, in other words, booking. After all, a hotel operation’s first goal is to fill rooms; mobiles just offer an additional opportunity to fill more rooms. Very few have really given thought as to why individuals would perform bookings on a ridiculously small screen. Booking a hotel room is booking an experience. It has nothing to do with booking an airline seat or train ticket. And this applies both to leisure and business bookings. If I can choose between taking a cab from the airport plus a mediocre hotel room or take the subway and a significantly better room, there is no doubt that I’ll choose the latter. The experience matters and you need to have an idea in advance of what it will be like before making up your mind. You want to see the location, pictures of the hotel and its restaurant, and possibly virtually visit your future room. A mobile screen is rather impractical for that given its form factor. So, in a nutshell, I believe that booking capabilities on a mobile are needed, but we must not dream too much about the additional revenue it’ll generate.

If you tell me that slate computers have a larger screen, I’ll tell you they are not that different from laptops, and the difference will become smaller and smaller with time. The most recent tablet computers are equipped with solid state drives and are already booting in seconds (say, less than 10, like the Apple iPad), and their battery life is improving all the time. Slate computers are not mobile telephones. They give you a hint about what laptop computing will be very soon.

So is the future of mobiles disappointing? Not quite.

While there are only some scarce cases where you want to book a room from your mobile, there are a lot of cases where mobiles can be used to order services during the hotel stay. And you know what? It’s largely still a vacuum. In the following list we can see customer satisfaction enhancement services and also revenue generating ones:

- Updating the booking, adding a night or cancelling the last one. These cases are not uncommon and happen often after check-in, and possibly while guests are not at the property;

- Booking or updating amenities at the hotel. Guests have already had a glance at what the property proposes, and just want to place a reservation at the restaurant while at the pool, or playing a round of golf while they are still in a… business meeting (okay, I know that's not really professional, but it happens). When you think about it, this is massive and not anecdotal;

- Booking a cab;

- Room service;

- Checking in and out of course, and opening the room door with the phone, and everything around requiring localization of the guest. With a GPS equipped mobile, we can now locate guests down to a few meters, allowing delivery of items or food without asking convoluted explanations from the guest to be able to find him in the property, and allowing guests to ask for pickup wherever they are, even far from the property.

Even better, some devices now have a gyroscope and a compass. Combined with the camera, augmented reality can bring them to their room, they just need to follow the arrows on the screen.

I’m so convinced, I’m going to look for independent app makers to buy their stock!

Surprisingly, web sites have invested in sophisticated flight search systems, while still offering limited hotel search mechanisms.

I see two main reasons for this:

First, there are many reasons to book hotels, each of them triggering totally different needs and requests. When I travel for business, I choose hotels located close to my meeting locations and offering a business center. The lowest price is not my first criteria.When travelling for leisure, there are a number of different circumstances possible. For instance, from a short weekend break with friends – where a basic hotel with just the basic necessities is required – to a few days vacation with my wife to celebrate our wedding anniversary – where a nice place is necessary since the hotel experience is crucial.

Secondly, the hotel business has not gone through the airline pricing transformation seen in the last 5 to 10 years. Following pressure from low cost airlines, traditional airlines have invented the concept of fare family, a sort of flight package allowing the traveler to get the most appropriate price and service according to his or her travel needs, while enabling the airline to up-sell through online merchandising.

So what characteristics would the ultimate search experience encompass when booking a hotel? I would say simply: intuition and trustworthiness.
Most of my trips can definitely be categorized within three to five groups, ranging from business to leisure as mentioned previously. Therefore, in 90% of cases I don’t need to bother entering a sophisticated list of amenities, the system should determine them based on my travel aspirations.

I would expect the system to automatically match my service expectations with the property profile. This property profile would most likely be deduced by the system from the hotel characteristics and traveler reviews which are collected after each stay.

It seems that an obvious approach would be a plain text expression for the request. That’s basically the way I search on Google, why wouldn’t I be able to do the same on Expedia or Hyatt.com? Of course I’ll make typos, but does that matter? The system will adapt just like Google does today. For example:

“Business trip to New York to visit IBM, 5th street, for 2 days from Nov 28” or “Looking for a room Saturday 24 Dec 10mn from Cuneo, Italy” or “one week of nice sea and sun vacations with my wife mid May 2011”.

Geography is complex and radius search is often much more efficient than city search. If a hotel is five blocks from your meeting but it’s located in a suburb of the city your flight arrived in, then you may not have been proposed by the system, which usually searches “by city”.

Also when price is a priority, I want the system to estimate a total trip cost. What’s the point in looking for a cheap hotel for a transit night at Orly airport if the only way to get there is a return taxi, doubling the total cost? The Hilton airport would have been cheaper!

I often hesitate between three or four hotels suggested by the system. To compare, I usually have to navigate within the web site back and forth from one hotel description page to another. What about having a single comparison page where the four hotel descriptions and pictures are displayed next to each other, and where I can immediately spot which one has the features I’m looking for ?

To facilitate the hotel reservation experience, hoteliers should certainly evolve their offer strategy to adapt it to the strong need of a personalized service.

Indeed, a room can be offered with just a basic bed and shower, or going as far as a sophisticated TV set, gaming system, office desk, telephone, wifi, paintings, printer - you name it! By creating such a modularized offering, hoteliers can easily respond to new consumer demands. They will also be able to package services and adapt their pricing policy to their costs. Why would a hotel invest in desks or telephones for all rooms if, by experience, only 50% of the occupants need one?

Personalization, if anticipated, is a huge opportunity for hoteliers to adapt their costs to their revenues and thus to optimize their margins. 

In all three cases however there is no carryover from one service to another. While this might not be a big deal when a trip is uneventful and there are no delays or hiccups, it is a big deal when something goes wrong. Here is where the guest would benefit if there was a concerted effort on the part of the travel providers.

Airlines, hotels and car rental providers are not alone in this conspiracy. There are plenty of other service providers in the chain that could add to a guest’s experience with minimal effort. Let’s talk use case:

Traveler is flying on a business trip from city A to city B. His flight however is delayed and he arrives quite late at his destination, well after midnight. Not able to communicate with the hotel in-flight, he now has to make his way through a mostly deserted airport, look for a taxi on duty and hopefully make it to his hotel where he may or may not still have a room. Perhaps the hotel changed him to a no-show and sold his room. Or more likely he still has a room but because its so late, there are no services like restaurant outlets or room service that are available. Or perhaps he rented a car but has to wait an exorbitant amount of time for someone to help him because there are several people from his flight that are now standing at the car rental counter but there is only one attendant.

This scenario is not that outlandish and probably happens all the time. But it doesn’t have to be that way. What if data was shared amongst these providers? What if the airline alerted the hotel of the flight delay? What if they went so far as to tell them the traveler’s name on the delayed flight and the hotel shuttle was dispatched to the airport to be there when the flight landed? Or, what if the car rental provider upon issuing the car, notified the hotel that the guest was en-route? With location based services, the map and directions to the hotel could already be displayed on the car GPS or the traveler’s own mobile device.

All of these services are available today; travel providers are simply not handing off the traveler from one provider to another. And why is that? Well, what’s in it for them? Quite often these organizations are suspicious of one another on a good day and while they may have cooperative marketing agreements with one another-that’s on the pre-sale side. There are no synergies happening on the service side.

But servicing the guest is where we all get to differentiate ourselves. Sharing data could spawn entirely new revenue streams for providers. Yes, ancillary services are cool and merchandizing at the point of sale would be neat but what really separates the men from the boys are the travel providers who can offer services when it really matters. When a flight is cancelled or a guest is walked or there are no more cars left at the car rental counter, then your ability to partner with other travel providers can make the difference in that traveler or guest’s trip or stay. And the ROI on that is immeasurable.

Over the last couple of weeks we have run a poll on social media on the main page of our Micro Site. The question was: Will proliferation of social media impact hotels technology infrastructure?

The results of the votes are very interesting. 67% of respondents agree that social media will impact hotel systems, 16% consider that it will not impact hotel systems while 17% are still undecided.

These results tell us that marketers and merchandisers can be truly creative, but only if they are enabled to do so by technology. For hoteliers to embrace social media they need to ensure that their entire technology systems infrastructure is not only ready, but that it will place them at the forefront of this new interaction.

Here are some examples of what can be done with social media, but just think a moment about how from a technology perspective these can be implemented.

Hoteliers commonly use rate comparison tools to get valuable information to feed their revenue management systems. However, there is no reason why they cannot be using keyword systems to pick up on broader conversations beyond their own branded and competitor branded terms, right now. Furthermore, they could be using these systems to alert their marketing departments and build on-the-spot promotions in their Central Reservation Systems to be available immediately on their web sites, advertised on Facebook and communicated via Twitter.

Property Management Systems (PMSs) could evolve with concierge applications enabling guests and hoteliers to communicate more easily prior to or during a stay, including links to Facebook. For example, after guests have checked-in, a message could be sent from the PMS to their Facebook inbox to welcome them to the hotel and provide them with more information or even offers at, or around, the hotel.

Social media can also help with sales. By harnessing the volume of conversations hoteliers can show, through what people are saying, why those people’s peers should consider them. Guest books used to do this on a one-to-one basis but now social media can do this many-to-many, instantly and globally. Imagine the power of enabling guests to post their comments, pictures and videos in an online resource, in much the same way they do now on TripAdvisor. This would necessitate changes to the hotel chain’s content management system, making them robust enough to host new content and the necessary workflow and security to accommodate that. Equally, the brand website should support this extra public content without disrupting the navigation and response time.

However, marketing also depends on raw information, and there is much that can be done in this area to make the information work harder. For example, the Central Reservation System could be plugged into Facebook, so that confirmation of bookings could be notified on the guest’s Facebook inbox, with appropriate upsell and cross-sell offers as well as concierge services. The booking confirmation could also provide a link to a video of the property or any relevant information the hotel wants to communicate. And, because sites such as Facebook are designed to allow sharing, these videos could spread in a viral manner.

So let’s answer the questions we started out with. What does the industry need to do to embrace social media? How does the industry, and the systems which drive it, need to change? The answer as confirmed by our poll results is that existing systems will have to be adapted, throughout all business functions from research to marketing to customer relations. Furthermore, to gain real value they need to be much more integrated, without damaging their current performance or their brand perception. 

On one hand I realize the industry has truly changed. Indeed, the distribution channels mix is very different, the quality and diversity of on-line distribution has improved tremendously and the number of applications that hoteliers can use to improve their operations is more varied and sophisticated.

On the other hand, I recognize the industry is still slow in moving ahead. Much more could be done to address the many changes driving the industry, and this has been confirmed by the many discussions we had with hoteliers. This feeling of somehow slow motion can be attributed to the structural particularity of the hotel business which, by nature, is extremely decentralized and requires a perfect orchestration of all its resources. Hence initiatives such as HTNG which stimulate cooperation between hoteliers and vendors to facilitate the convergence of systems.

In a world that evolves faster and faster, the changes that hoteliers are facing require rapid adaptation. We all know it is not easy, but in teaming up with the right partners, hoteliers can better navigate the new environment and better adapt new industry drivers while transforming their business.

New generations of guest and new guest segments are challenging hoteliers and technology suppliers to adapt to new expectations and guest interaction. It is a reality which will accelerate.

With the opening, and then the very rapid growth of new geographies, global expansion has a true meaning and we all need to adapt to these new territories, buying patterns and languages. Deploying solutions fast and easy is now a must.

Delivering brand value at all steps and to all actors (owners, shareholders, guests, employees) has become a priority which requires excellence in operational efficiency at all levels.

As a technology vendor we must feel part of the hotelier’s success. In such a new context, the old fashion model of supplier and customer relationship is behind us. Hoteliers need to have the right partners on their side to navigate in this complex world. We, as technology supplier, need to understand the changes and coming trends in the world of hoteliers and travelers that will shape the future in order to innovate and deliver the right solutions.

Over the past years we have talked to many hoteliers and actors in the travel space to understand how their world is changing. When we started working on our newly published white paper (Invent the future: the new normal for hotels in 2010 and beyond) we really wanted to get an industry insider view and confirmation on some of the major coming evolutions we had identified over the past years. This report confirms and highlights these many changes.

A technology partner should not only be a supplier who understand processes and propose a solution to execute these processes. A technology partner needs to understand the underlying forces that will shape the future of the industry to propose a forward thinking vision that will allow making a leap and difference. We are on the same boat as our hotel partners and we all have a role to play together to create the change.
 

In these days this was almost science fiction, but this was also my very clear vision of the evolution of hotel systems. I knew that we could bring the technology that would allow hoteliers to revolutionize their operations, and that we could create a technological ecosystem where hoteliers and other travel suppliers could share information and easily book each others services for the benefits of their customers. I knew that hoteliers would one day access to travel technology in a radical and different way than the traditional model that has been used so far with CRSs and PMSs . A new solution should be delivered with a clear vision:

1. Help hoteliers to transform their business
2. Create the system that allows travel companies to help people travel better

And indeed at Amadeus we had all the pieces of the puzzle to make it become a reality.

The first step towards transforming the hotels operations business was to create a true single view of operations and a new way to look at the business. A centralized view of all hotels data and processes will not only lead to more efficient operations, but also enable well targeted, intuitive and profitable services to guests. The hotel processes that would benefit the most from centralized operations include content, rates and inventory management; guest profiling, group booking and business intelligence.

The second step toward transforming hotel operations was to bring hotel operations into a wider travel technology ecosystem. Sharing the same technology infrastructure with other travel suppliers allow to exchange information and to cross sell in a very easy way.

A flight is cancelled. The guest doesn’t need to call the hotel to secure his/her room for a late arrival. Hoteliers and airlines or railways wish to partner and provide preferential services or rates to travelers, they can easily book each others services and provide special rates, upgrades or any other services by accessing each others without building costly and complex interfaces. It’s all there, all in one at their fingertips. Call center or Concierge services can vastly be enhanced with the capability to book any travel services from the call center or property. And these are only few examples of the new world that is now opened to hoteliers.

It is just the beginning of a new technology world for hoteliers. It’s no longer science fiction, and the vision of giving the means to travel companies to make people travel better is becoming a reality thanks to the right technology.

We are no longer dreaming, or if we are it is with our eyes wide open. But for a dream to come a reality, people need to leave their dreams. I think it is not a matter of if, but a matter of when. Solutions exist today. So, when will the industry move into to these new territories? Tell us what you think, we’d love to hear your feedback and opinions.