Inputs on Hospitality & Hospitality tech trends for 2022 and year ender stories

Before we get into the main topic about how ready Indian hotels are for 2022’s expected travel boom, let’s see what the future holds for the hospitality and travel industry. According to India Brand Equity Foundation, from $32 billion in FY 2020, the Indian hotel market, including domestic, inbound, and outbound, will touch $52 billion by FY 2027. Moreover, the Indian travel market, which stood at around $75 billion in 2020, will grow to $125 billion by FY 2027.

Considering the statistics mentioned above, it is safe to assume that the industry is all set to bounce back in 2022 despite the threat of Omicron looming large, thanks to the resurgence of travel, fuelled by relaxed government norms and aggressive vaccination drives. Now, let’s find the answer to the biggest question – how ready hotels are for 2022 and how IT can speed up the recovery process. Allow us to share our insights with you –

Ensuring cost savings, accessibility, and operational automation

Hotels are just getting back on their feet. But then it is inevitable to adopt an all-in-one cloud Hotel PMS. With no additional investment in servers and IT teams, it will help them save IT overhead costs and lower their software ownership costs. Another critical point is empowering the staff to do more with the Hotel PMS. Yes, that’s right. Hotels are not yet ready to fill the vacancy created due to workforce restructuring during the first and second rounds of shutdowns. A cloud Hotel PMS can also solve this problem by streamlining the entire operation across departments with less human intervention. Talking about offering system access and on-the-go flexibility for remote employees, a cloud Hotel PMS can address this too. Hotels can allow their remote staff to work uninterruptedly by accessing the Hotel PMS through any handheld devices over the web or through the Mobile PMS app.

Becoming guest-centric

This is explicitly about their preparedness to offer a touchless guest experience because it is the new norm. To ensure this, they need the right set of technology solutions to empower guests to upload personal documents, select rooms, check-in, unlock the door, control in-room amenities, initiate a service request, make payments, and checkout via their smartphones. The mandate here is clear – guests need a touchless experience, and only technology can help hotels with this.

Another way to become guest-centric is by knowing them well. Hotels can achieve this by looking at insightful data derived from the Hotel PMS and other applications. It will help them configure relevant packages, including staycations, workcations, and highly personalised wellness vacations, to attract more guests for extended stay periods.

Strengthening multi-property management

Here is another strong trend we all need to watch out for – with an increased footprint in the country, international hotel chains will account for around 50% of the hospitality sector by 2022, primarily by going asset-light. And when they do this, they would need a robust cloud-based hotel software that can help them with centralised control over the multi-property

operation, central reservation office, central management of travel agents and corporate clients, advanced group-wide reports, and access to the centralised guest history.

Selling more rooms, managing revenue, and increasing reputation

When travel goes up, hotels need to sell more rooms to increase occupancy. And for this reason, they need to leverage the power of integration between a cloud Hotel PMS and a channel manager software. It will ensure that their rates and availability are up and live across all the connected sales channels in real-time, thus reducing the chances of overbooking and double booking that could lead to guest dissatisfaction.

Again, with increased travel, they also need to make necessary changes in their room rates based on length of stay, and only an intelligent Hotel PMS with occupancy-based dynamic pricing feature can take care of this concern. Finally, the hotel management system can help increase their brand’s online reputation and ratings through an online reputation management integration.

Conclusion

No doubt, hotels look all set to enter 2022 with renewed vigour. While the whole world will be watching how things unfold in the coming months, technology-led preparedness will make things easier for hotels. Hotels must adopt the right tech solutions to make the best out of the much-awaited travel boom in 2022.

—-

Comments

0