Oracle Hospitality Takes Hotel and Vendor Gripes Seriously At Last
Skift Take
For too long, Oracle Hospitality, a giant in the hotel tech space, has prioritized internal needs. Now it's changed its tune. It says it's making hotels the boss. The long overdue customer-first approach is laudable. But there's still work to do.
When it comes to providing tech services to hotels, has Oracle Hospitality turned over a new leaf?
In the past year, new leadership has stirred hopes among global hotel groups, hotel management companies, and hotel software vendors that Oracle Hospitality would stop acting spastic.
Hotels, especially higher-end hotels with the most ambition, have delivered trenchant criticism of Oracle Hospitality for several years. The tech brand's flagship product is the property management system, or PMS, which stores a golden record on guest and room inventory data. Oracle's various property management systems — including Opera, its best-known one — run at close to 40,000 properties.
Last week, hoteliers and vendors gathered at an Oracle Hospitality customer conference in San Diego. They saved their loudest applause for Darko Vukovic — a critical player for the company's ability to easily integrate other third-party and broader Oracle applications to Opera Cloud..
Vukovic listed pitfalls facing vendors when attempting to plug into Oracle Hospitality. (Details, in a moment.) Vukovic ended his list by asking the audience, "Does this summarize the pain points we have today, knowing that the volume of your reaction will be directly proportional to how much budget I'm going to get to solve them?"
The crowd applauded intensely.
Sad But True
Vukovic rattled off problems, such as expensive licensing fees, expensive integration costs, expensive onboarding of partners, and no phone number for customer support when there's an integration hiccup.
On the technical side, Vukovic said developers faced incomplete access to methods of communicating data, called application programming interfaces, or APIs for short. He said Oracle needed to adopt more modern APIs and protocols. Vukovic also spoke to developers in their language, using phrases like "poor performance," "poor scalability," "legacy protocols," "proprietary protocols," and "multiple protocols."
"This is really terrible," said Vukovic, who joined Oracle Hospitality in November 2018 after having led integrations at the parent company. He then laid
