HT-NEXT Insights From Agilysys

How can hotels best leverage technology right now to meet the challenges of the pandemic and economic downturn?

During this pre-recovery phase, the best thing hotels can do today is offer as much guest facing technology as possible.  Enabling connected devices to meet guests where they are ensures guest comfort on property but also can increase efficiency, loyalty & engagement. In the last several months we have all become familiar with the touchless interactions needed for safety, so the focus turns to operational efficiency, loyalty, and engagement. To achieve this, hoteliers will need to know guests better to provide personalized digital and physical interactions. Creating a guest profile that organically captures preference and transactional data from each touchpoint and applies the learnings to both digital and physical experiences is essential. These solutions will create a technology foundation that provides long term benefits to both the guest and hotel.

How should hoteliers start thinking beyond the pandemic as they chart their tech roadmaps for the coming years?

Adoption rates of guest facing solutions are very high right now and will be for some time.  Roadmaps that allow for a digital transformation and provide technology accessible where guests feel most comfortable and safe will prove beneficial.  Including well integrated, cloud-native solutions that provide actionable insights at each interaction support your hotel’s desired guest experience.  More specifically, consider technology with a profile service that is continuously learning from explicit and implied data provided by guests at the point of interaction.  Then use this data in marketing for personalized offers and in operations for meaningful value-added interactions.  The time is now to embed these solutions into your long-term planning to help drive more meaningful guest experiences and revenue. Gone are the days where a guest is asked “Have you stayed with us before?”.