The Covid-19 pandemic has radically reconstructed the nature of operations for hospitality industry. Hotels have now started to adapt to advanced & cutting-edge technologies to attract and pull more guests.
However, according to senior industry leader, there is lot more to be done to bring in all hotel solutions under one umbrella, so that hoteliers do not need to have different technology solutions from multiple service providers.
“This would ease out the pain point of the hotelier as they need not have to depend on multiple service providers to give them support and will also take care of the price point as hotels post pandemic are a bit stretched out as far as revenue inflow is concerned,” said Pallab Goswami, Vice President, EaseVenture in an interview with Tech Observer's Nisha Kumari.
With pandemic creating unprecedented challenges to the hospitality & travel sector, what kind of technology alignment or repurposing of IT infra, you have witnessed in the last two years?
Post-Covid, customers demand anything and everything to be contactless, right from the check-in, room service, housekeeping, food delivery platform to check-out. In this situation, no consumer is ready to meet someone new. Meeting a stranger irrespective of them wearing masks and other safety precautions makes the customers panic. They firmly believe in Touch-free services.
Contactless check-in app & restaurant POS are the two of our services that have improved the experience of the consumers. Apart from these benefits, the hotelier can manage and monitor all the activities through these apps. It will keep the hotelier informed of everything he wants to know.
Why should hoteliers shift from legacy systems to cloud-based hotel management solutions? How can they do this in a manner that it is not cost-prohibitive?
Remote working has become the order of the day! With technological advancements, even people-centric industries such as hospitality face a rise in telecommuting. Hoteliers can manage all their hotel processes virtually with cloud-based PMS (Property Management System) and control all operations. When integrated with mobile apps, it will be helpful to engage with the customers. Hotels can assign remote work to few jobs, shifting from legacy systems to cloud-based hotel management solutions to automate their daily operations completely reduces server costs, improves the infrastructure, and database security.
How do you look at emerging technologies such as AI, ML, Robotics, AR/VR for the hotel industry? Do you see any large deployment of these solutions?
Technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI), Robotics, Virtual Reality (VR) are the trend of higher-end hotels. Highly rated hotels overseas have implemented these features. Implementing this will promote your hotels to value themselves as modernized and trendy, and bring in more customers to utilize your services. These top-grade technologies offer complete luxury and a fresh customer experience. This feature involves a lot of investment that only few topmost hotels can avail of at this point in time. It will take a very long time for other hotels to adopt to this technology, so there will be no large deployment.
Many organizations have witnessed a slowdown during pandemics. How has been last financial year for you?
The Covid-19 pandemic has radically reconstructed the nature of operations in various areas, mainly in the hospitality industry. To overcome the obstacles raised by the pandemic, hotels have started to adapt to new advanced & cutting-edge technologies to attract and pull more guests. With this in mind, we offer various products like restaurant POS & contactless check-ins, to several prominent hotels all over the globe. It was quite a challenging period, we took up those challenges with a strong heart and managed to endure the pandemic period.
What are your future plans for growth and increasing market share?
I would like to bring in all hotel solutions under one umbrella, so that hoteliers do not need to have different technology solutions from multiple service providers. This would ease out the pain point of the hotelier as they need not have to depend on multiple service providers to give them support and will also take care of the price point as hotels post pandemic are a bit stretched out as far as revenue inflow is concerned.
