Invest in technology: more relevant to the hospitality industry
Digital transformation has accelerated due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We have no doubt about that. Therefore, investment in technology gains weight in business strategies and budgets, regardless of the size of the company. Even for the smallest, incorporating technologies into your management can make the difference between surviving and getting ahead or disappearing. In the case of hospitality, digitization of processes in areas such as reservations, finance and marketing, had been gradually ascending.
In the first case, for example, the irruption in the tourism sector of technological intermediation platforms for the purchase of vacations, and even for bookings of business trips, for example, forced companies to rethink the fare management with very different tools compared to those which had been used before. The direct -or through agency- purchase model had given way to clicking from a mobile device to reserve a room, an airplane seat or a complete vacation.
The pandemic, so damaging for the hospitality industry, has increased our need for security and our digital lives. And that’s going to stay that way after it is ended. For example, contact less habit will stay forever.
We will continue to want to avoid touching anything that is not essential and this, for example, makes smartphone applications key tools for managing the experience in hotels, restaurants and catering establishments.
It has become common to use QR codes to access a menu. We are discovering places whose room locks open with a click on the Smartphone screen, or even that respond to the voice or face of the guest. The voice also turns on lights and televisions. And through an application we see where the cart that takes you from one point to another in a resort, thus achieving greater efficiency in the use of vacation time.
Therefore, the digital transformation of our hospitality businesses must not stop. Rather, it should be sped up. And this greater digitization of the sector reinforces the relevance of technological innovation and digital connectivity as a business strategy. In this way, investments in technology gain relevance as a competitive and sustainability tool.
More and better programs, applications and technological solutions will be needed to manage business administration, promote the commercialization of products and services, access relevant data, guarantee the security of customer operations on their mobile devices or make it faster browsing through them. So, there is no turning back.