Disruption is Leaving a Mark
Technology investment levels in hotels are expected to hit record highs this year. More than half of hotels (54%) have told HT they plan to spend more on tech this year. Our research puts hotel IT budgets at approximately six percent of revenue. Hotels have done well at spreading those technology dollars across system maintenance and innovation. According to Gartner, the ideal would be a 50/50 split, and hotels are darn close: 53% goes to technology systems that run the business, and 43% to technology innovation in the name of growth and transformation.
So… hotels are ready and willing to fund innovation, but disruption is still getting the better of them. Mobile projects dominate the list of new technology rollouts, having crept into everything from payments, to room access, to data. The amount of data these technologies are creating is far outpacing the hotel industry’s ability to measure and extract insight. CIOs pinpoint the struggle to establish technology ROI as very real — it’s their biggest challenge in HT’s research. The impact of technology is moving faster than business culture has thus far been able to sustain. Disruption is leaving its mark.
This is a topic we’ll be focusing on at this month’s Hotel Technology Forum in April. The event is themed, “Embrace Disruption,” and we’re featuring a keynote speaker who will speak directly to one of the most disruptive forces at play in travel today: the crowd economy. I’m also excited to lead a keynote panel with an exceptional group of industry leaders on how hotels can get ahead of the disruptive forces at work — IoT, collaborative economy, virtualization, mobile dominance, digital convergence, and the general rewriting of technology’s role in hospitality. I hope to see you there.
In the meantime, to learn more about the capital investment projects that will dominate hotel technology in 2016, check out this month’s cover story on mega trends. It’s that big.
So… hotels are ready and willing to fund innovation, but disruption is still getting the better of them. Mobile projects dominate the list of new technology rollouts, having crept into everything from payments, to room access, to data. The amount of data these technologies are creating is far outpacing the hotel industry’s ability to measure and extract insight. CIOs pinpoint the struggle to establish technology ROI as very real — it’s their biggest challenge in HT’s research. The impact of technology is moving faster than business culture has thus far been able to sustain. Disruption is leaving its mark.
This is a topic we’ll be focusing on at this month’s Hotel Technology Forum in April. The event is themed, “Embrace Disruption,” and we’re featuring a keynote speaker who will speak directly to one of the most disruptive forces at play in travel today: the crowd economy. I’m also excited to lead a keynote panel with an exceptional group of industry leaders on how hotels can get ahead of the disruptive forces at work — IoT, collaborative economy, virtualization, mobile dominance, digital convergence, and the general rewriting of technology’s role in hospitality. I hope to see you there.
In the meantime, to learn more about the capital investment projects that will dominate hotel technology in 2016, check out this month’s cover story on mega trends. It’s that big.
