Ajay Srivastava, Vice-President, Engineering, OYO Rooms

The Indian travel and hospitality industry is increasingly turning towards information and communication technology (ICT) to improve business processes and meet consumer demands more effectively. A number of them are also exploring new-age technologies such as big data analytics and internet of things (IoT) to provide a personalised experience to their customers. Leading travel and hospi­tality enterprises discuss the various ICT tools they use, the latest trends in enterprise technologies and their future plans…

What is your organisation’s IT and telecom blueprint?

There are two parts to our IT strategy – infrastructure and service. All the technologies and solutions used to run our offices come under infrastructure. The service side is what runs our applications. All our services are hosted on cloud platforms provided by Amazon Web Server and Azure.

What are some of the enterprise solutions/ applications that the company is using? How have these helped it enhance its business operations?

Our back-end infrastructure supports 20 applications, including six to seven mobile applications, six to seven online applications, mobile websites, etc. Apart from applications for consumers, we have apps for travel agents (which they can use to book rooms and earn a commission), for property managers (which helps in managing hotel information) and an owner app (for tracking various properties). Further, for our employees spread across 180 cities, we have deployed an application for audit functions. On the financial side, for settling payments between OYO and property owners, we have rolled out a module called Financial Reconciliation, which allows seamless settlement of accounts.

The property manager application helps in real-time inventory syncing across all hotels and properties listed on our site. This ensures that there is no overbooking of rooms. Through these apps, we have been able to overcome the operational challenges that an online travel agent typically faces.

What is the current level of adoption of technologies such as the cloud, IoT and big data analytics among Indian travel and hospitality enterprises?

Technology adoption in this industry is still quite low. At OYO, however, we plan to use some of these upcoming technologies to enhance the user experience. We are looking at how IoT can be leveraged to provide a new-age experience to our customers. For instance, a guest should be able to use his smartphone to manage his check-in and check-out, control the room’s temperature, order tea/coffee, etc. Our aim is to make the consumer’s experience seamless. We are also exploring big data analytics. We will churn the data that is available and draw insights from it to personalise a guest’s experience. Providing personalised recommendations is next on our agenda.

“Technology has shifted away from being a savvy, online phenomenon and is beginning to drive human behaviour.” Ajay Srivastava

What are the key challenges that enterprises in the travel and hospitality industry face with regard to managing their IT and telecom infrastructure?

For an enterprise in the travel and hospitality industry, managing the IT infrastructure in-house is a big challenge as it is not its core area of expertise. There­fore, a number of companies are turning to specialised providers for meeting their IT needs. As a policy, we prefer outsourcing our services. In-house hosting and server management are considered only when we do not find partners that suit our requirements.

What are the key technology trends that are likely to be witnessed by the travel and hospitality industry?

Technology has shifted away from being a savvy, online phenomenon and is beginning to drive human behaviour. For instance, in a hotel a lot of guests place requests for taxis at the reception during the morning hours. The people handling these requests may not be able to service everyone at the same time. Technology intervention can ease things by responding to requests in the order they were received. Solving human-intensive problems via technology is our goal. Technology may not be able to directly solve all problems, but it will surely drive behaviour that will enable solutions. However, it is difficult to say which technology is likely to dominate as it is constantly evolving