Technologies Every Hotelier Needs to Understand: Latest From Skift Research

When it comes to technology, a lack of integration and the resulting data fragmentation remains the biggest challenge for hoteliers. It is true that hospitality is behind relative to other industries when it comes to cloud offerings and Software-as-a-Service technologies. However, the smart hotelier of today is trying to be wherever his or her guests are and investing heavily in the back-end as well as front-end technologies to provide seamless services. For our latest research report, The State of the Hotel Tech Stack 2018, we interviewed 23 industry stakeholders — from tech vendors and online travel agencies to hotel brands, independent hoteliers, and hotel management companies — to understand the constraints of existing hotel tech and the possibilities when hoteliers make the right tech investments. We bucketed these interviews into two focus groups — our “Tech Vendor Focus Group,” which includes 18 tech vendors and one online travel agency (OTA), and our “Hotel Company Focus Group,” which includes two major hotel brands, one independent hotelier, and one hotel management company. Throughout the report, we provide their answers to key questions with regard to hotel technology. We include responses to one question, "What are your expectations for hotel tech going forward in terms of the future of hotel technology, whether that is artificial intelligence, voice search, payment privacy/security, robots, etc.?" in the excerpt below. We believe hoteliers should update their technology roadmaps to focus on the customer journey — from planning, searching, and booking, to the actual stay at the hotel, and through the post-stay experience. They need to think about technology in terms of how it can enhance the u