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SMARTreport Interview with... © photo: Mandarin Oriental 6 / HTNG (Hotel Technology Nick Price Next Generation) President Emeritus – HTNG CIO/CTO, Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group Nick Price joined Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group in January 2000 as Director of Technology. A newly created position, the appointment was in line with the Group's objective of strengthening its corporate and specialist core competencies in areas most critical to success. With more than 19 years experience in IT and emerging technologies, Nick brings to Mandarin Oriental, an in-depth understanding of current and emerging technology trends and their commercial application. Nick reports directly to the Group's Managing Director, Edouard Ettedgui. Hotel SMARTreport • October 2007 – April 2008 INTRODUCTION Knowing The Guest Making Information Accessible In-House Nick Price is one of the most respected people in the industry when it comes to having a global (in more ways than one) knowledge about Hotel Technologies and how they should be leveraged to truly enhance the guests’ experience. We asked Nick what was new at the Mandarin Oriental Group, and how he is leveraging technology to create a near to perfect guest experience... To some extent we are refining the path we’ve been on for a while, especially since 2003, leveraging networks to be able to either bring in content to a guest that makes sense, or enable our staff to understand something about the guest and to deliver a service that they otherwise couldn’t have done. Obviously we have been very focused on capturing information about our customers and making that available across our company in terms of an xml profile of the guest, and a fairly rich and deep and accessible xml profile that you can ask questions of the system... “What does somebody like to eat?”... or “What temperature should the room be at?”, or “What kind of wine do they like?”... Things like that... and just to make that information accessible. Once you have that information you have to think about how to deliver it, and that’s all about networks, and how do you communicate it to the front line staff, and that’s really all about access devices that are hooked onto those networks, and many of those networks are wireless today... www.cleverdis.com
Of course one would have to avoid saying, “Good morning Mr Smith, you’re not with your usual girlfriend today ... Oh, it’s your wife?”... You know that’s a cliché ... I’ve heard that so many times. Are we in the business for? We’re in the business to satisfy 99.9% of our guests or are we in the business of XXXXing of 0.1% of them? Just because something can happen doesn’t mean you should build your company or operation around the fact that it will. While I know you meant it as a joke, there are a whole lot of people going around saying, “we’re not going to do this because of that reason. We’re not going to build information in the systems about our customer just in case we are talking about the wife when we should be talking about the girlfriend, and that’s just stupid. It’s just an excuse for not doing things right if you ask me. One of your pet bugbears is that of business models for internet. How are you seeing business models evolving today? First of all, you have to look at it from both sides, from the hotel side and the suppliers’ side. There is no free lunch. There is no free product today, and from www.cleverdis.com a hotel’s point of view you wouldn’t want to. If you go back five years ago, everyone was rushing for the revenue share “land grab” and the suppliers were very much looking at the long term, saying “we’ll lose money on 2% utilisation, but we’ll make it up on 20% utilisation”, and the hotels were saying “I don’t care, I just want something that satisfies today’s guest. Now those hotels are saying “At 20% look at the amount of money you’re making, Mr Supplier, and I still have three years to go on my revenue share contract!” So both sides have learnt. On the supplier side, they’re looking at it and saying “How do I renew my contract with the certainty that I’m not going to be able to roll-over a revenue share contract on the same percentages as I did before?”... Because the unique technology I had back then are now commodities... These can be used today in a much more accessible “Do It Yourself” fashion to the hoteliers. So hoteliers if they wish can assemble these HSIA networks themselves these days at a cost, but that cost is generally affordable based upon the revenues that are a fairly near certainty today and into the near future, so there’s a fairly strong ROI for DIY. Looking out a little bit further, the attractiveness of a DIY model becomes INTRODUCTION less attractive today if you consider the services you are going to have to bundle onto that network to make it attractive over the long term, because again that’s very much harder to do that it is just to put a simple HSIE service in place today... and also the fact that your costs are definitely going to increase as well, because the bandwidth is increasing, significantly so, and that has to be paid for. So really there are two sides of the thing. Revenue share was a model that is not necessarily the right model for the future, but it may become the right model again as you add more feature functions. In the past you have spoken of the importance of “bringing the technology islands together”... talking about the different technology groups within the hotel. How do you see this evolving? I guess this is indelibly linked to the HTNG? It is in a number of ways. Firstly, they are broadly together these days, or they certainly are at Mandarin. We have fully converged networks today in our hotels... fully converged IP networks. So from a functional view you have HSIA, Video On Demand and IP television on the same set of cables – the same network as the administrative network, back of house, © photo: Mandarin Oriental Hotel SMARTreport October 2007 – April 2008 / 7
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