The Hotel Cloud Checklist
In the following post, Michael Heinze, Shiji’s Chief Architect and Managing Director, shares clear steps to bring your hotel’s processes and tech stack safely and fully into the cloud. Download the hotel cloud checklist for yourself below, and read on for more context and insight to help you be fully up to speed.
How The Cloud Enables Better Hospitality
Hospitality is a personal and engaging industry, and hotels want their technology to reflect these qualities to better serve their guests. Despite the trend of larger hotels and the widespread availability of the Internet, guest expectations have remained the same. What has changed is how guests expect to receive services. In the past, bookings were made through mail inquiries, phone calls, or fax. Legacy PMS was the system used for these bookings, but it was built to meet the needs of 30 years ago. Today, guests expect personal recommendations, fast information, services, and the logistics to deliver them. Guests want immediate results and expect self-service, which legacy PMS was not designed to provide. Cloud PMS, and hotel cloud technology in general, on the other hand, is designed to be connected and available to guests at all times.
Cloud PMS provides a generational leap in technology, as it eliminates the need for physical installation on a hotel’s server. This feature enables guest apps to communicate with the server, allowing for immediate service. The guest has control over their service needs, and the hotel can deliver those services without connectivity or bandwidth issues.
Cloud platforms enable quick turnaround times for product changes and increase service quality. The hotel can use the information generated by the platform to use the guests’ preferences to better tailor their product. Mobility and connectivity enable new ways of service, such as a meet-and-greet with immediate check-in from the airport. Legacy systems are incapable of handling the complexity of tasks expected today, making a cloud system’s DNA inherently different.
The hotel cloud platform provides a generational leap in technology, enabling quick turnaround times for product changes and increased service quality. In short, it’s the flexible, agile, robust solution hotels need today.
Bringing Your Hotel Tech Stack to the Cloud
Understand Your Hotel’s Cloud Operations
The crucial aspect for a hotel is to genuinely comprehend its current operations and envision how it wants to function in the next five years. Alongside these questions is another: are there any limitations in the existing PMS and IT systems that determine the current workflow? Hoteliers must be cautious not to become complacent with outdated processes and instead consider how operations could run if there were no constraints on updating existing systems.
This principle applies not only to PMS but also to POS, CRM, and any other components of a modern hotel company. Consider your goals for the next five years and work towards them, particularly in terms of guest and staff experiences. It is well-known that staffing is as vital as selling and servicing guests, so both aspects should be taken into account. Ask yourself: What are your plans for staff members? What are your plans for guests? How can you best achieve these goals? Consider ways to improve customer interactions, manage guest requests, and even explore alternative revenue streams by upselling, upgrading, or bundling products that may not be feasible at present.
A hotel must have a clear strategy for its business, product, and the type of hospitality it aims to provide to customers and, ultimately, the industry. The subsequent steps are merely milestones on the path to achieving that vision. It is essential to enhance service and connectivity for guests while simultaneously automating tasks, decreasing workload, and boosting efficiency for staff.
Examining infrastructure, connectivity, and security is crucial; however, these are areas where your technical specialists will work based on the objectives you outline for them. Once this vision is established, all other elements will align to fulfill it.
Look Ahead
Map out the existing systems you have at the hotel, especially those that were a large capital investment, such as key lock systems, internet access, TV systems, payment services, and so on. Make sure you’re up to speed on all those and look for a platform that serves all the features in the systems that you see as core elements of the vision. Don’t get sidetracked by products with hundreds and hundreds of feature points: as a leader, you need to have your top three or top five objectives to be achieved in the next five years and select which vendor has the best capability to fulfill your chosen objectives for this time frame.
Choose Appropriate Systems and Decision Makers
You need to identify the primary systems like the PMS, CS, and distribution systems, as well as the helper systems. Generally, the primary systems necessary to bring the vision to fruition are one or two, perhaps three in special cases. Do not get distracted by questioning everything in your operations, but focus on finding the core systems needed to realize your vision.
Supporting systems are usually needed for specific functions, and most serve the needs of a specific department, like payment gateways, marketing systems, and guest review systems. The bigger the hotel, or the more luxurious the offering, the more helping systems it tends to have, therefore make sure that each of them brings value to the department they are serving, as more systems mean bigger efforts in seamless connectivity.
Make a conscious choice as to who will have the deciding power when it comes to systems deployment. It can be at the owner level, board level, or even management level, as long as it continues for the next few years and the person has an understanding of the entire IT landscape of your hotel. As long as it fits with the bigger picture, leaving the decisions for supporting systems to respective departments can make the whole process more targeted and efficient. Automation makes internal processes faster, and in most cases when that happens, guest service also becomes faster, benefitting the guest experience.
The Implementation Phase
The implementation is mostly straightforward once the right solution and vendor for your hotel are chosen. It is expected that all major vendors will provide support in the migration process, as technology is advanced enough to not make data migration a concern. The only exceptions may be cases of systems that can’t take two-way integration, such as in some organizations with more than one hotel. For example, when the organization has an old CRM database that only takes updates for core files and doesn’t accept updates coming in, then it’d be difficult to build a good migration path.
For most organizations though, it is possible to build a comfortable and risk-free coexistence model, so even if they have hundreds of hotels, it is possible to do the conversion and migration property by property. “Big bangs”, or all-at-once rollouts, aren’t necessary today. Migrations don’t create any big catastrophes anymore, and they tend to go smoothly, regardless of vendor choice. However, it is prudent to choose a less disruptive period for the change, such as the low season for your property.
Future-Proof Your Systems
Whichever platform you choose needs to be open to a lot of automation. The state of things is always fluid, like with constant regulation changes everywhere, different partners, new technology, supply chains, distribution chains, and new legal and fiscal environments, just to name a few variants.
Also, ensure that you’re not in a position that makes you tied to a product/vendor, or, even worse, locked out of any options. This way, if a need arises for your hotel and the vendor isn’t capable of providing for it, or if you are the single hotel that wants something done, you can search for a partner who is.
That in itself is an argument against legacy products because they aren’t changing anymore and many are now approaching the end of life. Hoteliers can be stuck with vendors and legacy products and become unable to realize their objectives, simply because vendors are not investing anymore, or the old product doesn’t support the necessary change. It’s important to emphasize this again: Look for a partner that is planning for a constructive future, and that sells products where hotels themselves can add, extend, modify, and customize things on their end.
Honestly, nobody knows what the world will look like in three to five years, especially in a world like today, so you need to expect everything. We don’t know the unknowns.
