Interview with Samrat Bose, Associate Director, Systems and IT, The Park Hotels -

Samrat Bose, Associate Director, Systems and IT, The Park Hotels

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

Property management system (PMS) on Oracle Opera – Whether a property is a small two-star hotel or a multi-site luxury brand, its availability, rates, reservations, guest profiles and in-house services can be managed with this application. Also, hotels can integrate their traditional PMS with a central reservation system (CRS) in a single database. PMS also helps hotels add any package item to any rate plan, allowing guests to dynamically enhance their packages and stay experience. Further, when customers make a reservation or check into a property, the PMS can determine their lifetime value. It also allows a hotel to track guest preferences, simplify reservations and provide guests with personalised and consistent services.

Rate Gain Enterprise Solution (ResGain) – ResGain is a robust hotel channel manager and online rate distribution and management solution that updates the hotel’s room inventory, rates and restrictions across various inline travel agents. It sends real-time updates to multiple online channels backed by its pooled inventory capability, reservation retrieval system, advanced productivity reports and promotion management.

Guest Feedback System – We have deployed Howazit, an end-to-end platform for personalising guest experience. Howazit empowers us to engage better with our guests, understand their needs, improve their overall experience, drive loyalty and ignite our positive online presence.

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

Today, every industry is pursuing new ways to leverage different data and to bring all the constituents together across the customer value chain. Big data analytics can deliver a positive customer experience by using the right information at the right time. Many hotels and travel companies are already making the most of big data to enhance their financial performance and pave the way for a more distinctive and holistic experience for guests. In fact, big names in the industry have gone a step further and are using big data for predictive analytics to drive price optimisation. The key elements are booking trends, market dynamics and customer behaviour. With big data, they are even looking to gather detailed mouse movements of website visitors in real time as they browse web pages. The emergence of big data technology is continuously encouraging travel and hospitality companies to actively utilise various platforms like social media and email marketing among others, to tap potential clients.

Over the past few decades, there have been many attempts to adopt various technologies for tourism development, but very few have become successful. Most of them are limited to pilot projects or uncompleted prototypes. But one key sector in tourism that has been largely receptive to new technology is the hotel industry. It is also the sector that can benefit greatly from cloud computing. According to analysts, the hotel industry’s way of handling information and computer resources will soon be transformed with the migration to the cloud, regardless of the size of the hotel.

A number of hotels have already begun to use cloud technology to improve the overall guest experience. Some of these include improving the time-to-market of new systems through affordable pricing, as well as being able to extend the life of their existing systems in order to gain competitive advantages in the hospitality industry. Some hotels are being more creative in employing a cloud-based guest internet platform, which allows them to maximise revenue while providing a compelling guest experience.

“The emergence of big data technology is continuously encouraging travel and hospitality companies to actively utilise various platforms like social media and email marketing to tap potential clients.” Samrat Bose

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

The hospitality business model is characterised by high fixed costs and variable income. Fluctuations in occupancy and room rate demand tight cost control. At the same time, guests demand excellent service. In this environment, every advantage must be wrung from technology. Some of the ways in which communications technology can play a pivotal role in providing optimised solutions to key industry challenges are as follows:

Guest profiling: Gathering and using guest preferences and intelligence to enable the delivery of a superior guest experience is a big challenge. IT can enable the business in making this data available for greater customer intimacy and anticipation of returning guest needs.
Social media: Implementing and integrating new customer engagement channels, notably social media with contact centres for optimum efficiency, has become a key strategy. A hotel’s reputation is created in the digital space by reviewers and guests. Monitoring this and making careful interventions must be a priority for hotels.
The demanding customer: Every guest touch-point can be a make-or-break experience, an opportunity to win or lose the repeat business that drives bottom line performance. We are exploring how these issues are actually communications based and how technology can be leveraged to deliver the experience that guests demand.
Lowering costs, increasing revenue: Identifying new revenue streams while deriving savings through operational efficiencies is an important consideration for hospitality enterprises, especially from non-room revenue sources such as banquet facilities rooms, spas, golf, conference rooms and restaurants. Using technology to optimise staffing levels and the tools used by them (including mobile electronic devices required to do their jobs), and streamline shift changes to maximise productivity and savings is another key challenge in the sector.

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