Travel consumes a huge amount of my thoughts every single day. If I am not working with my team and partners on pushing innovation in travel technology, I am likely traveling myself.
If I am not traveling for business or pleasure, you’ll likely find me discussing market challenges with hoteliers somewhere in the world.
It’s fascinating to hear about the impressive work hoteliers are putting into creating a pleasing experience for the guests. A significant premium and effort is put on consumer facing technology. And it makes sense.
But when I put my own expectations as a traveler side-by-side my expectations of the technology ecosystem that is supposed to bring the travelers to the hotels, I am left unimpressed with existing solutions.
As a traveler, I have continued to watch my favorite Netflix show from my phone on the hotel TV, I have ordered room service with voice-enabled technology, and I have used my smart phone to unlock my door.
Many hoteliers and their technology partners have done a remarkable job creating a connected experience for me as a guest.
But, as a product leader for hospitality distribution technology, I think we can do much more to give hoteliers a seamless end-to-end experience for them to distribute their rooms with a lot less work.
Doing more
The distribution concept known as “Channel Management” was born about a decade and a half ago, and today there are few distribution or revenue management professionals that are unaware of the technology.
A few industry players have made great strides in creating an ecosystem that connects property management, revenue management, and central reservation systems to hundreds of distribution channels.
Shopping and booking data can now flow freely from consumers to hoteliers because systems are in many cases better connected. But after all these years it’s still not much more than simple connections passing data back and forth.
The dashboards and reports that accompany the tools are rarely more than simple graphs of number of bookings per channel. These dashboard “insights” rely on months of booking data before providing any sort of actionable intelligence.
It’s my opinion that we’re letting hoteliers down in a lot of ways. All the integrations and connections we have created for hoteliers have not entirely made their job easier.
In some cases, it has become more difficult and more time consuming.
Efficiency works for everyone
In effort to make everything more efficient, channel management products have just shifted hotelier’s work to tedious implementations, lengthy configurations, mapping to new channels, and maintenance to keep the channels live and producing.
In other words, there’s too much management in channel management. Distribution and revenue management professionals are shedding sweat and tears on going live with new channels, based on little more than hope that these new channels will produce for them.
So where and how have we failed these customers in our promise to make life easier for them?
The short answer? Informed decision making and ease of use.
We have given hoteliers an abundance of choice, but are we helping them make the right ones for their business?
Some of the players in the connectivity space are making huge investments in marketing and selling to hoteliers, telling them they’ll help increase occupancy and revenue.
On the contrary, it seems that once the ink is dry on that contract and the lengthy implementation starts, hoteliers are left to figure it out on their own.
When compared with consumer technology, it seems we’re still a decade behind in applying the advancements to distribution.
So, while a traveler can change the color of lighting in the room with a simple voice command, the hotelier must wait weeks or months to get that same room distributed on a new channel.
So, it’s time we re-think the entire ecosystem of connectivity. The best part is that a lot of like-minded people from the industry are keen on contributing their expertise to make this happen
That’s why my team and I have made it our mission this year to help hoteliers make more informed decisions about their distribution strategy and to make it easy and intuitive to make those decisions.
So, as we set out on this journey, I would love to hear from hoteliers around the world on the challenges you’re facing to make sure this is not yet another broken promise from a connectivity provider.