Mobile, Social Media and Integration: Tech Innovations for your Hotel

Digital technology is progressing and evolving at a rate that’s, frankly, hard to keep up with for many. Already, changing digital trends have brought big changes to the hotel industry. They’ve changed the manner in which hotels are managed and driven improvements and opportunities for increased revenue – but only if hoteliers are committed to throwing themselves into them. If you run a hotel and are unsure where to turn when it comes to digital innovations for your business, read on!

 

Let’s face it; the better and more successful the hotel, the more amenities it probably offers patrons. Nowadays, more and more accommodation features multiple areas – not just rooms and suites, but restaurants and bars, spas and gyms, function rooms and club amenities. It could well be that, should this be true of your hotel, these different areas may be operated via different software systems, but the more amenities you add into the mix, the more complicated and cumbersome a practice that becomes.

The answer is to integrate all of them into one software system to ensure faster reporting and a proper, comprehensive view of profitability, not least if you implement hotel revenue management software. This is because integrated software should bring together the marketing and service offerings of the hotel with control over its entire revenue generation.

 

Thanks to the evolving mobile industry – and its dominance as a form of communication and online connectivity in today’s highly digitised world – the hotel guest experience is becoming ever improved; when it’s harnessed by hotels correctly, that is. Hotel employees can now spend more valuable time interacting with travellers via their handheld devices to deliver a better service and guest experience than ever before.

In times past, hotels have relied on traditional, manual registration systems for processing their guests, yet in incorporating mobile innovation into their everyday operations, hotel staff can now not only greet and interact with travellers at any time and wherever the latter may be, but also ensure they can make reservations themselves (via booking engine software), check-in to their rooms remotely, make bookings for other amenities and communicate in any and every other way by a mere click on the device in their pocket.

 

Another element that comes with the ever increasing use of mobile technology right across the world is people’s increasing engagement with social media. Hoteliers should look to online platforms of that type like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Foursquare as enormous marketing opportunities. Indeed, every hotel worth its salt should at least have accounts on the first two social media mainstays mentioned above. They represent terrific opportunities to promote your hotel, its amenities and packages via links and imagery – and get people talking about your services for free!