SMARTreport - Deuromedia

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