TECHNOLOGY
DO YOU COMPUTE? Five industry aces dish about staying on the cutting edge of today’s changing technological landscape COMPILED BY HELEN CATELLIER
HOTELIER: How will
technology change the hotel landscape in the next five years? Warren Dehan:
The front desk will be a secondary thought to guest interactions. Guests will check in online, pick up their key at an automated station or use their mobile device to open doors, fulfilling their on-property needs digitally from their devices. Interactions with hotel staff will be less about function and more about service. We already have one client in a Northwest wine area removing their front desk and turning it into a wine-tasting area and breakfast bar. Sean Shannon:
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president at Northwind Canada Inc. in Markham, Ont.; Warren Markwart, principal of MK2 Hospitality in Toronto; Blair Reid, manager of Property IT, North America for Starwood Hotels & Resorts in Toronto; Walid Salem, VP of Information Technology at SilverBirch Hotels & Resorts in Vancouver; and Sean Shannon, GM of Expedia Canada in Toronto.
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Another consideration for hotels will be continuing to offer additional value. According to our mobile survey, travellers selected Wi-Fi accessibility as the top perk at hotels with 56 per cent of travellers worldwide stating Wi-Fi availability impacts their purchasing decision. Our survey findings reinforce that hotels must continue listening to what
HOTELIER: Which
innovations will help save money? WD: All of them. One area
we’ve been experimenting in with our partner HeBS Digital (based in New York) is recovery features through the online channel. This will not only save money but is designed to increase revenue. Research across our portfolio shows 95 per cent of website visitors abandon the reservation process. [Hotels can] regain that lost revenue with our reservation conversion optimization tools (pop-up windows with exclusive offers, targeted emails, et cetera) designed to help target guests that show an interest in your property. SS: [Expedia’s free travel]
app will often feature mobile-exclusive savings and deals, allowing travellers to save even more when they book in the palm of their hand. Earlier this year we introduced Media Lounge, the latest addition to the Expedia App for iPhone or iPod touch. With Media Lounge, users will have the opportunity to download free premium content at the beginning of each month. Furthermore, the hoteliermagazine.com
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n this age of BYOD (bring-your-own device), smartphones, tablets and wearables confirm software improvements are a growing necessity in hospitality. So, stay tuned as five gurus from across the country weigh in on the changing tech landscape and tell us how hotels are accommodating guests’ needs to connect on their own terms. The panel includes Warren Dehan,
consumers request, including the ability to connect to their online world at all times without any additional costs.
Expedia Media Lounge also recommends [curated] content (both free and paid) to help customers with their travels. HOTELIER: How are
hotels accommodating the demand for Wi-Fi? Warren Markwart:
Hotels are struggling with the business model for providing free Wi-Fi, and they are trying to understand if free and quality Wi-Fi is a competitive advantage. Guests are making purchasing decisions [based] on whether a hotel has free Wi-Fi or not. Most hotels’ Wi-Fi networks are overloaded, with guests travelling with multiple devices and using streaming services such as Spotify and Netflix. Many hotels are adopting two-tier Wi-Fi access: the free Wi-Fi is for email and standard web-page browsing, and if you want faster speed and more bandwidth, the guest has to purchase a premium service.
humans, and it’s all by thumb typing on a miniature keyboard. The actual technology in a hotel will continue to grow to meet the expectation of millennials. The challenge is for hotels [to adapt] to a non-verbal method of communication in a business that is about guest service. Blair Reid: New technolo-
gies like Google Glass, Apple Watch and mobile platforms continue to be where millennials are accessing and interacting with our brands. We saw this with the demand for mobile, keyless checkin. As well, being active and engaged in these channels is in line with the lifestyle of our guests. This is especially true of our tech-savvy, elite SPG members who are more likely to download our app, book via mobile, participate in ratings and reviews, link their Facebook profile to SPG, et cetera. One in four Platinum Members live a truly mobile lifestyle. HOTELIER: How are tablets
changing the way hotel employees use technology? WM: The obvious area
engaging millennials and meeting their technology needs? WM: Communication on
their terms and schedule is how millennials look at interaction with fellow 44
hotels are looking at using tablets in is their restaurants and bars, for servers taking orders. Housekeeping is where there is the greatest advantage, managing housekeeping employees and tasks, from real-time delivery and modification of room
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Walid Salem: You don’t
always want to be tethered to your computer to make decisions; you may want to see it from your dashboard from home or you may want to see it on your mobile device in a meeting, which would include a tablet. Whether it’s a tablet or a smartphone or a connected laptop, Wi-Fi and Ethernet, at the end of the day it’s all the same — it’s portable. And it’s the data you’re bringing to the portable device that is more important than the device itself. HOTELIER: What techno-
logical innovations have you adopted?
BR: Soon everyone’s smart-
phone and SPG App will be the remote control for their Starwood experience. SPG Keyless allows guests to check in and use their smartphone or Apple Watch as a key. Travellers are more tech-savvy than ever before, and wearable technology is the newest platform that provides information in an easyto-access way to support the needs of our guests and enhance their travel experience. The [SPG] app for Google Glass empowers mobile travellers with a new view as they explore destinations and book stays at hotels around the world. The experience enables guests to review their SPG account and
immerse themselves in any of Starwood’s nine brands. HOTELIER: Should hotels
embrace the cloud?
WD: Our first advice is to
choose a product [based] on its ability to satisfy the operational needs of the property; the deployment technology should be secondary. A cloud-based system that can’t help the hotel run effectively is a wasted investment. Once the operational needs are met, then a cloud-based offering is a great solution to minimize infrastructure costs and ongoing maintenance. [But] depending on the size of the property, and its entire IT requirements, a cloud-based offering may be more expensive over time than an on-premise solution. The property must also consider the quality of [its] Internet connectivity and the cost of implementing a redundant connection should the primary connection fail. [At Northwind we are] of the mind that both solutions may work equally well, and it’s the specifics of the property that will dictate the better choice. WM: Hotels spend a lot of
money maintaining central servers to hold and manage data. The advantage of cloud-computing is that it reduces the amount of technology support a hotel requires and places data in a very secure place. Convincing senior hotel executives of this is difficult in light of the Target and Home Depot data breaches in 2014. WS: Over 99 per cent of
our infrastructure is virtualized, but cloud-based hoteliermagazine.com
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HOTELIER: How are hotels
assignment to instant communication of readyto-rent rooms.
services are not for everyone. When we looked at it earlier on, it didn’t make sense financially. Now it does. The prices have come down quite a bit. There are so many benefits: it reduces the amount of human management that you need to manage the hardware, because it’s sitting somewhere else; another party manages it; it reduces your investment on the actual hardware. The other benefit is sheer reliability. There are multiple centres, and your data is backed up. Data privacy is an issue. You have to be careful what [you] put in the cloud. Proprietary data, confidential data is not sitting necessarily in the cloud and, if it is, then it’s very well protected. Right now, there’s still a place for on-premise [data storage], but we measure that carefully.
and personal information will always be at risk of disclosure. Improved security features such as creditcard tokenization and new methods of guest payment will help secure data.
HOTELIER: How are hotels
WS: We’re PCI-certified.
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protecting themselves against data breaches?
WD: [This] is not a finite
task but an ongoing effort. From software that is PA-DSS (paymentapplication-data-securitystandard) compliant, to PCI (payment-card industry) compliance at the property level helping with some security, credit-card hoteliermagazine.com
a company can do is reduce the footprint of carrying any credit-card information.
BR: Starwood’s investment
and focus on mobile is paying off; mobile bookings are growing five times faster than the annual growth rate of the web channel 10 years ago.
HOTELIER: How is
technology impacting the bottom line?
WM: Hotels managed by
chains that have large central technology departments do a good job at maintaining policies and systems to prevent data breaches. Small independent hotels and franchise hotels are at great risk of data breaches. The biggest exposure they have is establishing Internet access on PCs in their hotel, which opens up access to their data from anyone who has access to the Internet. A hotel must maintain up-to-date software, policies and procedures.
WS: We know we will save WM: In an industry that
is very service-oriented, technology innovations and application will result in significant labour savings — particularly in housekeeping, which is productivity driven and uses procedures and systems that have not changed significantly in decades. The advantage that technology will bring is a more consistent level of service, especially when dealing with peak service times.
labour costs by going to a consolidated system, one where we can see how our employees are spending their time. You cannot get there from a data analysis standpoint without software. I would say the time and attendance system and the ability to view data and analyze it is where the cost savings comes in. We’ve done a return on investment that clearly shows the payback for implementing this technology. u
BR: Providing a safe
environment for our guests and protecting our guests’ personal information is the essence of our business. This is why, when we introduce new programming like SPG Keyless, we [do] not use an off-the-shelf software platform. Instead, we create the software and hardware hand-in-hand with our partners. We’ve got a third party that works with us to continually assess [it], and we do both internal and external penetration testing. Where guest data exists, we have encrypted databases. We don’t hold credit cards anymore, outside of a couple of properties because of branding, but those are tokenized. The best thing JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2015 HOTELIER
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