September 2022 Digital Issue

HIGH-TOUCH HOSPITALITY
Amidst the focus on tech trends, HITEC also offered labour solutions
TECHNOLOGY
BY LARRY AND ADAM MOGELONSKY
This year’s HITEC — perhaps the world’s foremost
hospitality-technology tradeshow — marked its
first full return since the cancelled 2020 outing
and the scaled-back exhibition in Dallas last
September. A whirlwind of a show, the light
at the end of the tunnel for hotels across Canada is that
every technology vendor was keenly focused on helping the
industry solve our labour issues.
And while the exhibition, — this year, held in Orlando,
Fla. — may already be several months in the rearview
mirror, the industry’s current challenges are not, so it serves
as a reminder on the importance of tech to support hotel
operations and evolve the brand with new service offerings.
Key to helping with labour is automation, automation
and more automation. But there still seems to be a stigma
around this word because of the implied creative destruction
underpinning it — an assumed organizational downsizing.
The opposite is, in fact, true.
The automation of hotel operations is actually about using
software, and perhaps a few ounces of machine learning and
behavioural science, to handle the repetitive tasks that some
associates would have to carry out manually in order to keep
things running smoothly. Now, with those basic functions
digitized then digitalized, your teams have more time to focus
on complex tasks — the work that gives their jobs meaning
— be it direct contact with guests, finalizing a big sales deal,
10 | SEPTEMBER 2022
developing a new brand initiative or anything else that gives
a staffer or manager a sense of accomplishment.
Even a platform that helps reduce e-mail notification
volume will do wonders to lessen the interruptive work that
blocks managers from devoting large chunks of time to a
singular project and produce quality results. E-mail can be
a silent stressor of nearly any modern workplace, so aiming
for the Holy Grail of ‘inbox zero’ via a slate of automation
tools will have a profound ripple effect on the happiness of
your teams.
To paraphrase one of the smartest technologists in the
hotel industry, this ‘no touch’ automation enables the ‘high
touch’ of hospitality.
So, how exactly is tech helping hotels address their labour
challenges through automation? This would take more than
a 100 pages to properly demonstrate all the neat features that
specific vendors have rolled out. Instead, we can summarize
the solutions presented at HITEC and a general approach to
hotel technology in five broad principles.
1. Develop a process for continuous success.
Deploying anything new is hard. From evaluation and
implementation, through to team training and ensuring
ongoing ‘daily active usage,’ technology needs to be
hardcoded into your culture through SOPs, rich data
integrations and, above all, a tacit ‘why’ that every member
hoteliermagazine.com
of the team understands. With so many vendors, a hotel
stack can easily become convoluted to the point where
incremental improvements to the guest experience are
stymied by incompatibilities or ‘zombie platforms’ that no
one really uses.
2. Protect your human stack. Regardless of the
hardware and software deployed, ultimately everything in a
hotel comes down to the people you have who find the best
solutions, develop the platform interfaces and maintain all
the systems. The more the world of hotels becomes entangled
with technology, the more central your IT team becomes and,
at the same time, the more paramount it is that everyone
in every department have a firm grasp of how it all works.
Nurture your people that make this happen by embracing
technology on the cultural level and supporting this process
through continuing professional development.
3. Simplify before you expand. The whole notion
of ‘zombie platforms’ implies many disparate silos of data
co-existing and overlapping. Look to simplify by finding
partners that can deploy versatile solutions. Quite often,
the best solution is to first deepen your relationship with
existing vendors rather than deploy a new one to fit a narrow
range of functionality. Again, part of the process must be
to continually upgrade your human stack by ensuring team
members are trained on all current systems and have time to
keep up-to-date with all the latest technology news.
4. Build rich data connections. Whether it’s an
integration or interface, hotel tech stacks are gradually
moving towards unified guest profiles and sophisticated
customer personas at the centre, with onion-like layers of
automation software extending outward to all departments.
You will unavoidably need a field manual to understand the
alphabet soup of hotel technology acronyms out there —
PMS, CRS, POS, CRM, RMS, BI, WBE, CMS, PM, CDP
and so on — but these pieces cannot exist in isolation. You
need good IT professionals and a clear vision to build the
data connections that will make all these tools actionable
and improve the guest experience.
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5. There will always be more you can do. One of
the most profound beauties of technology is that it never
stops improving. Each vendor is hard at work developing
new features to stay competitive, while companies outside
the hotel industry will influence the direction of the guest
experience, either directly through bespoke products and
sales efforts or implicitly by influencing customer behaviour
or traveller demands. Technology is as much a process of
evolution as it is any given function, thus reaching a likewise
mindset to ensure success.
With labour hard to find for the foreseeable future,
automation is of critical importance for hospitality, starting with
the process that will define the timetable of priorities for the year
ahead. Then, luckily for you, HITEC next year takes place at the
end of June 2023 in Toronto, offering all Canadians a great host
city in which to learn and be inspired. ◆
Larry and Adam Mogelonsky are partners
of Hotel Mogel Consulting Limited. You
can reach Larry at larry@hotelmogel.com
or Adam at adam@hotelmogel.com
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