Technology in hotel industry
Introduction
Despite a growing of the value of modern, integrated systems, many properties still do not take advantage of them as fully as they might to maximize revenue opportunities. Many also fail to support and secure them to the extent appropriate to the value of their data and to the legal consequences of that data becoming stolen or corrupted.--Hospitality management system have evolved into sophisticated, well integrated, multi-discipline tools capable of helping properties of all types and sizes that attract more guests, generate more revenue and reach much-improved levels of efficiency.
However, many properties handicap themselves through hanging on to systems well past their competitively useful life, greatly restricting their ability to implement such revenue-enhancing measures as taking Internet reservations, performing effective rate/revenue management, collecting more detailed guest data for customer relationship management and targeted marketing, and so on.
All of these factors encourage the movement towards more professional systems management; either from a corporate resource team shared among many properties or contracted out to a professional third party.
STATEMENT OF THE STUDY
This study aimed to determine on how a significant factor restricting wider adoption is the challenge of improving the system's ease of use as they continue to grow in functionality, in both operational and guest-facing areas. All of these support a trend to outsourcing the more complex operational functions and system security to expert, central staff, either corporate third party.
The major factors involved are:
* the complexity of the hotel environment, which historically has required many different systems to interact with each other,
* a lack of awareness of how much efficiency could be improved through the use of modern