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The hospitality industry has known great development in the past few years, with more customers than ever, it is estimated that the industry represents 10% of the world’s GDP. The industry also employs 10% of the world’s workforce.
The space is huge and isn’t going to slow down any time soon. This article will develop on what the industry is, why it relies on technology, and how it implements it to answer this massive demand.
The hospitality industry can be defined as the act of making someone feel welcome, usually through entertainment and comfort. This includes businesses such as hotels, resorts, restaurants, theme parks, and much more.
If you want to try and classify a business in the hospitality industry, ask yourself these questions:
If you answer yes to any of these questions, there’s a strong chance that the business discussed is involved in the hospitality industry to some extent.
The industry is mostly growing in Asia where it now represents more than 30% of the global business travel sector.
The space works around two sacred rules, the respect of the guest from the host and the respect from the host to the guest.
The use of technology in this industry is typically intended to either make life easier or improve the overall experience for customers. The technology used revolves around a wide range of IT and e-commerce solutions to increase efficiency and provide the best overall experience.
As the sector is extremely competitive, it is essential for businesses to keep up with the latest hospitality technology trends. This helps organizations streamline their processes, reduce costs, lower staff workloads, lower staff workloads, increase revenue generation potential and improve the level of customer experience delivered.
Technology solutions also make work more manageable and may make it easier to live up to the increasingly high expectations that customer have nowadays.
The most important reason why hospitality businesses should keep up with the latest technology trends is that many other businesses will keep up with it. Not paying attention to your rivals and the solutions they put in place may lead you to fall behind, missing out on significant competitive advantages
As the use of technology in this industry develops, customers within the industry start to expect certain things. This makes the tech essential as businesses need to live up to the expectations of their clients. Meanwhile, adopting the tech first gets you a competitive edge.
Adopting the latest trends also means you can make progress continuously and not have to catch up all at once which may be more difficult and extensive.
Let’s now look at the different tech involved in the hospitality industry. These sometimes change the customer’s behaviour and can greatly impact the business.
As voice search is being adopted, the hospitality sector isn’t missing out. Capitalizing on this can make users privilege your application as the demand for voice recognition is growing. This includes everything from having smart speakers in hotel rooms, to being able to adjust various in-room devices through voice control and allowing users to use voice search in your applications.
Due to the convenience of contactless payments, users have come to expect it. This speed up payments and improves customer satisfaction. This also adds the ability for your customers to pay with their phones, bringing them convenience and ease of use.
Chatbots have become increasingly important over the several years, their importance is growing, especially as customers now demand swift answers to questions at all times of the day. Hotels and restaurants also often attract demands from different time zones and having staff is sometimes not an option.
Mobile chek-in also proves to be an important area to give consideration to, it can help improve the customer experience at the point of their initial arrival, this sets them up for a great impression and a great start to what your customers will experience about their stay.
This technology is one of the most important emerging tech trends in general, but its application to the hospitality sector is quite interesting. It could provide easy and seamless integration using biometrics, benefiting the various hotel processes and customer purchases.
As businesses in the sector face periods of large demand, AI can provide a way of optimizing the technical processes to match the demand. AI can also help monitor all of your channels and deliver swift responses with the help of chatbots.
Chatbots can help understand simple questions and provide answers almost instantaneously, this takes the burden away from customer service staff and improves the experience for customers. The domain of AI generally influences other technologies and works in parallel with data analysis, this is definitely a tech trend to watch out for.
Augmented reality has exploded as a tech trend in a similar way to VR technology, but is even more accessible, typically with little more than an internet connection and a smartphone. Unlike Virtual Reality which places the user in a digital environmen, augmented reality is about enhancing the real world environment with an information overlay. This coild be the speed at which you’re going, or a message you’ve just received.
This allows companies to provide users with more information about the local restaurants, museums and more.
The hospitality industry is all about service and providing the best possible experience to the customer. Technologies have a particular role to play as they make services more reliable, more efficient and can provide information at times when a human couldn’t.
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