Open Platforms Will Power the Future of Lodging Technology

Led initially by the need for contactless solutions and later the need to operate more efficiently, the COVID pandemic has led hoteliers to take digital adoption more seriously. According to McKinsey, the pandemic accelerated digital adoption by several years — 58% of all customer interactions globally are now digital, compared to 36% prior to the pandemic, and these changes are here to stay.

As new solutions enter the fray, the decades-long conversation about fixing the hospitality industry’s fragmented technology ecosystem – one where hoteliers find themselves relying on at least five different systems to operate a single property – has been thrust back in the spotlight.

While we all can come to an agreement that an industry-wide digital transformation is necessary for hotels to meet new guest expectations and operate more efficiently, there are many different views on the right way to get there. An increasingly popular solution has become a “platform” approach to the hotel tech stack. But as you dig deeper, you’ll find that “platform” means many different things to many different people, and almost has become a buzzword that solutions-providers have latched onto to appear innovative.

Currently, as it relates to a true open platform serving the lodging industry, we think tech partners are falling short in best serving hosts and hoteliers. Many providers are passing off a network of patched-together systems as a “platform,” but in many cases, the end users (aka property employees) still struggle with technological shortcomings such as data silos, synchronization issues, and weak integrations. 

In order for the hospitality industry to really meet the needs of today’s accelerated digital transformation, properties need access to a true open platform – one that not only provides solid base applications that can run any type of lodging business, but also one that has flexibility and extensibility to allow for the customization of internal workflows and the easy integration of third-party applications.

Here are four ways a true open platform can benefit hosts and hoteliers:

1. A fix for the fragmented tech stack.

While hoteliers scrambled to find ways to make guest touchpoints “contactless,” a new segment of travelers has emerged with heightened guest expectations. But, it’s difficult to meet new and emerging guest expectations when the tech stack is fragmented.

When systems are fragmented, data can’t be shared quickly to the teams that need it in the timeframe they need it to make meaningful business decisions. When insights can’t be shared without bottlenecks, not only do revenue opportunities fall by the wayside and operations stall but the guest experience also suffers.

In a platform environment, new solutions seamlessly integrate into the system — either natively or through APIs —  ensuring that data flows through all necessary applications within the platform in real time.

2. Built for scalability.

Not every lodging company has the same needs. For instance, an owner with one hotel will require different tools than a company with a large portfolio or a large hotel chain. The great thing about a true open platform is that hosts and hoteliers can scale up or down as needed. They can pick the tools within the platform that work best for their business needs.

Not every property has the resources to staff a huge IT department. A scalable cloud-based hospitality platform that can meet the needs of both small and large properties allows lodging businesses to streamline overhead and technical setup.

3. A way to democratize data.

A true open platform would help to break down problematic data silos. The platform can centralize data within a data lake and make it easily accessible to other applications, from your reservations calendar and guest profiles, to your channel manager and booking engine, to your reporting and analytics suite.

When data is democratized and shared with the right teams at the right time, operators have the ability to move the business forward in meaningful ways. Even more important, teams are looking at the same data. That means you can close silos that exist across departments, from revenue management, marketing, sales, operations, and everything in between.

4. Improve the guest experience.

The guest experience continues to be a key differentiator to remaining competitive in today’s constantly changing world, and travel companies that prioritize the customer experience can gain loyalty, build resilience and future-proof their business, according to McKinsey.

Democratizing data is especially important when it comes to providing a great guest experience, both on and off property. An open platform allows hosts and hoteliers to seamlessly integrate all data from all systems to gain important insights. For instance, are your guests experiencing friction on your website when they go to book? Or, are they waiting too long at the front desk during check-in? A guest experience management program can capture guest feedback that analyzes customer experience trends throughout the guest journey.

While a guest experience management program is a key piece of the tech stack, such a program can’t succeed without connecting data across departments – from sales and marketing, digital teams, operations.  An open platform allows hosts and hoteliers to integrate all the data to gain important insights that can drive decisions to move the guest experience forward. And that can’t be done without seamless integration with systems that work together.

Moving the Industry Forward

At the end of the day, hospitality needs to leave behind the alphabet soup of systems providers and implement a more efficient, single-platform approach that fits all types of lodging businesses across the world. Seamless application interfaces and integrations, scalability and extensibility, and data sharing and synchronization aren’t necessarily common terms among hospitality professionals, but with the digital transformation happening in this space, they will be critical to providing the frictionless guest experience that travelers not only want, but expect.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Richard Castle is the co-founder, President and COO of Cloudbeds. Richard wrote the first line of code for the Cloudbeds booking engine when he was frustrated booking a pousada while traveling in Brazil. Richard holds degrees in Molecular and Cellular Biology and Japanese Language from the University of California, Berkeley. He was also a Blakemore Fellow and completed the 2006 - 2007 Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies Program in Yokohama, Japan. He later earned an MBA from the Rady School of Management at the University of California, San Diego in 2013. Richard speaks English, Portuguese, and Japanese. He splits his time between San Diego and São Paulo with his wife Tania.