The Internet has changed our professional and personal lives. Often, that change has been disruptive, and disruptive change is often viewed negatively. Despite that, I suggest these changes have resulted in developments that benefit us profoundly. Here is my Top 10 list:
E-mail
Yes, e-mail management is a challenge, but e-mail has provided us with the
ability to communicate easily, globally and quickly. We ask questions,
disseminate information and conduct non-stop dialogues that did not (and
could not) occur prior to e-mail inception.
Competitor Information
Visiting competitor hotels to copy group and convention names from their
lobby reader board and calls to competitors' reservation offices have been
replaced by vastly more informative (and faster) access to their
websites. Competitive rate search tools such as Travel Axe, RateTiger
and TravelClick's RateView, now joined by meta-search sites such as
Kayak.com and Sidestep.com, have streamlined and improved this important
data collection process.
Recruiting
Classified ads in the local newspaper have, thankfully, given way to
employment opportunity buttons on our websites and the array of
hospitality-oriented employment sites like Hcareers.com and more general job
sites such as Monster.com. These enable us to publicize our openings
and draw from a broader, deeper labor pool. Yes, there are still waves
of resumes, but now they are electronic.
Information, information, information
Need a new source for coffee mugs? Want to find the addresses for
travel agents in Milwaukee? The web has almost everything, and search
engines like Google, Yahoo and Ask.com help us to find it (in sets of 10
entries at a time for 3,853,002 listings!)
The World is our Marketplace
In the hospitality industry, the Internet has removed geographic boundaries
-- our client base is global.
Our Hospitality Encyclopedia
News, vendor announcements, who's moving where, best practices for just
about everything, corporate policies, brand standards and staff training . .
. newsletters, manuals, policies and procedures and so much more are now
immediately available online.
Web-based Systems
Internet-based property management systems (PMS), point-of-sale systems
(POS) and other previously locally installed technology are becoming more
widely available. Local hardware maintenance, periodic software
upgrades and the need for back-up tapes are beginning to disappear as
formerly in-house and directly maintained systems are replaced by
web-accessed technology that, incidentally, requires little or no capital
expenditure.
Guest Feedback Sites
TripAdvisor.com, Igougo.com, HotelChatter.com -- inconvenient for
hotels? Maybe. Requiring work to monitor - no doubt! These
immensely popular sites are now integral to travel (especially lodging)
shopping. TripAdvisor now has five million postings for 220,000 hotels
worldwide. Are these sites perfect? No. Biased reviews do
occur and readers recognize and discount these. In the end, operators
of good properties receive the acclaim they deserve and bookings follow.
Online Bookability
E-purchasing is on a roll. Consumers are increasingly comfortable
buying everything from pajamas to Christmas trees to cars online.
Hotel reservations are no exception. The Internet booking engines of
our brand or property websites, combined with those of the online travel
agencies (Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz, etc.) are enabling and delivering a
growing and increasingly global stream of bookings to us.
Relationships with our Guests
The web has enabled us to promote our properties more widely and
appealingly. Not only has it enabled instant bookability, equally
importantly it has enabled us to continue and strengthen relationships with
our guests. The results are both greater use of our properties'
facilities and loyalty to both property and brand. Hotel-guest
communication unfeasible in the pre-Web world is now not only practical but
highly productive.
Are the Internet and its World Wide Web a nuisance? A time trap? A rich resource? A business source? A source of untold future opportunities? Yes to all, without doubt. Are they the enemy? No, not at all.
©John Burns, Hospitality Technology Consulting 2007