Guest Post: The all-seeing IT

Simon Kaye, COO of Hospitality Technology Advisory, discusses how IT is the only department to touch every aspect of a hotel and how this can deliver strategic advantages  

Hotels have always had quite a poor relationship with technology, in terms of their investment in managing it, because it’s seen as quite simplistic. We all think we’re secret IT geniuses because we have so much of it in our homes: we all know how to configure wifi, we know how to connect to the Xbox, and, when our systems collapse, we know how to piggy back off the neighbours’. 

But just because I might be able to make a decent steak in my kitchen at home, it doesn’t mean I could walk into a restaurant and take over the evening shift. There’s very much a happy amateur approach to technology in hotels, which is often at the heart of some of the issues the sector suffers from. 

There is also a belief that, once installed, everything is going to work and there’s no need for further input. We know that’s not true in any other aspect of a hotel - teams need training and support, menus need to be kept fresh, rooms need renovation - but there is a binary approach to IT: it works or it doesn’t. People prefer that it does.  

I was talking recently to the director of a large restaurant chain, who had been having issues with one of his sites which had been hard to explain. It was the same system as that across the estate, but it kept failing. On visiting the property, he found that the cables onsite were pulled tight like washing lines, so tight they pinged when you flicked them. During busy serving times they were being pulled out by people tripping over them and the whole system was falling over and causing revenue blips. 

An amateur might realise that having tight cables is a mistake, but they might not and it’s important to take the same professional approach to technology as you would elsewhere in the hotel. You need to know how the cabling should be done, how to ensure that you can still fire up enough of the comms cupboard so that people can pay, even in an outage. You need to be able to secure operations.  

The same is true of software. Users want to see the end product, they aren’t interested in how it fits with other products they are using, they just want to press the button and go. They are also often biased towards the familiar and have to be guided carefully towards new software, no matter how much better an advisor might think it is.  

 A professional will be able to take a true end-to-end approach to what is happening on a property, to understand the whole of a hotel’s journey, from the basic infrastructure to the lighter aspects of guest experience.  

You need to ensure that the staff are getting in on time and that they're clocking in, through to which rooms should they be accessing to clean and who is going where? Is it a generic card so we can’t trace who has been in which room? Does everyone have access to everything?  

Once you have a solid foundation where every piece has been considered, then you can layer in the software that sits on top of it and the processes should all work correctly. And once you have this, then you can see how everything works across the property; from electrics and reporting and heating and controls and all the way up. 

Once you have access to this data, you are in a position to look more deeply into the efficiency and the operations of the building and drive operational excellence, profitability and guest experiences.  

 Take energy usage. Hotels are required to report on this for sustainability targets, so there needs to be rigour in how it is measured. Hotels need to work on winter strategies - does it make sense for them to have guests collected in one part of the building when the property is less busy and reduce the heating in the rest, or is the hotel so efficient it doesn’t make any difference? 

 Data proves the efficacy  - or not - of such a strategy, which is otherwise based on guesswork. You can then see the ROI of your actions, including the ROI of making changes to your technology. This is why I believe that anyone making changes to a system should then hang around to make sure it delivers, something the sector doesn’t see enough of.  

 After all, an all-seeing eye only works if everyone is accountable.