Hospitality is a fast-paced and constantly changing industry which receives heavy impacts from the consumer behaviours and technological advancements. More and more hotels compete against each other to win the travellers' hearts; they all face the same challenge: mining the overflowing mountain of data to offer their clients with what they most desires.  

In today’s highly competitive market, it is vital for hotel owners and operators to implement new and effective strategies in order to stay relevant and safeguard their bottom line. 

Today, most hotel operators view the need to progressively improve their revenue management capabilities as a strategic imperative worthy of  garnering ever-increasing amounts of attention and resources, given the opportunity to improve financial performance in highly predictable ways. 

Blockchain technology has disrupted the way organisations view innovations in business. A blockchain is essentially a permanent and incorruptible ledger, providing visibility and audit-ability of all the transaction data, securing both digital assets and their value. For the hospitality industry, blockchain opens up new potentials and applications that are not only propitious but also inevitable in the future. 

Digital transformation has huge and positive impacts on traditional businesses. The hotel industry is not an exception. In this article, we will look at 5 digital transformation trends in the hotel industry and how they benefit customers and business owners.

The first simple hotel management system was introduced back in the 1970s, allowing hoteliers to confirm on-site reservations. By the early 1990s, the first database management system was marketed, allowing for digital records, which made accessing information much easier than Excel spreadsheets. Now, the hospitality industry is amidst the "cloud computing boom". The impact of cloud-based solutions is enormous: it revolutionises how the managers run their hotels/restaurants and interact with the customers.

You and your hotel staff are constantly flooded with information from emails, text messages, walkie-talkies, online meetings, and, of course, telephone calls. But your communication technologies are imperfect, because they exist in silos and are disconnected from core systems and processes. Because of that, your employees may lose key facts, fail to make necessary handoffs, and miss connections and opportunities to provide stellar service.

Infor is a leading provider of business application software with more than 73,000 customers, recognised for providing specific functionality to the hospitality industry, speeding up deployment through built-in reports, graphs and key performance indicators (KPIs). At HITEC 2015, this business application giant announced the great effort and plans for its hospitality division.

In particular, Infor d/EPM for Hospitality is designed with the advanced functionality to help implement and facilitate analysis. Another great feature is Office Plus which integrates directly with Microsoft Excel.

That’s the reason why there is no surprise that some of Infor d/EPM for Hospitality's famous clients include Wyndham Hotel Group, Kempinski Hotels, Auberge Resorts, Intrawest Resorts and Hard Rock International.

Read more: Automating financial forecasting for hotels with cloud-based systems