Here's How Internet Can Take the Hospitality Industry to New Heights Cutting edge technologies to revolutionise global hotel market
By Ravi Taneja
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In the olden days people had to rely on travel agents to plan and book hotels and flights. The advent of internet based travel services has enabled all of us to eliminate travel agents, at least in the conventional sense of walking into a physical outlet.
With high speed internet and cheap Smartphone's available ubiquitously, the power to plan and purchase travel services has never been made this easy.
Today we can not only verify the prices and deals, but more importantly we can analyze the look of the hotel through photographs, descriptions and read real reviews helping us make smart purchases. Many platforms allow chat or some form of contact with the property owner before booking the property.
Rise in Sharing Economy
With standardized properties and recognizable brand names, conventional hotel chains offer stable, but similar experiences. The success of platforms such as Airbnb has promoted vacation properties as unique, affordable accommodation options for travelers. This has brought new properties and players to the market to compete with hotel chains.
With each vacation home or room different from the next, they offer unique experiences when compared to hotel rooms.
The sharing economy has offered a serious threat to the mainstream hotel brands and with industry enablers creating world beating technologies to help vacation home owners distribute and manage inventories better, we are sure to see quite a power shift in the hospitality industry.
Growth in Online Distribution
Cloud enabled distribution platforms have boosted inventory reach and efficiency. Scalable solutions such as booking engines and revenue managements systems created specifically to help small hotels and vacation home owners have turned the industry upside down.
Smart Property Management with Low Overhead Costs
The aim of any world beating technology solution in the hospitality industry is to increase efficiency and reduce overheads in managing the business (property and guests). Smart property management via cloud based applications, even accessible via Smartphone has given the power to the business owner to manage and run with absolute control at affordable costs.
Increase in Investments in Vacation Rentals
What affordable business management solutions have done is unearth home owners to convert their secondary and tertiary homes in to hospitality destinations. This has driven investments in properties fit for vacation homes steadily.
Democratized Hospitality Industry
Investment in technologies that have brought in millions of small time players to a level playing field alongside hotel chains has democratized the hospitality industry like we have never seen before.
An ever growing travelling population from the developing economies is driving demand for cutting edge, affordable services in the travel and tourism industry. We can expect a future where the infusion of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) offering never before seen insights, driving industry wide innovation.
