Recent TRG blog posts

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.

Learn more: Hospitality resource portal

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 EPM for Hospitality is designed with advanced functionality to help implement and facilitate analysis. Another great feature is Office Plus which integrates directly with Microsoft Excel.

The hospitality sector serves millions of customers every day. Each of them checks in and out with his or her own expectation. Some only need to have a room to stay during a business trip but some other customers also demand other services and spend thousands of dollars on restaurants, dining, entertainment, sports, and spa treatments.

For a hotel chain, which may own, operate or manage thousands of properties around the world, revenue management truly is a daunting challenge. In recent years, many hotel chains have heavily invested in Business Intelligence (BI) to drive their revenue management. The massively powerful data analytics capabilities provided by Business Intelligence solutions have created giant leaps in revenue optimisation of hotel chains.

These are the lifestyle trends that will be shaping the hospitality industry in the next 12 months, according to Muriel Muirden, a renowned hotel designer and trend forecaster.

Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) such as Expedia, Agoda or Booking.com have become a crucial source of hotel revenue. Independent hotels are particularly dependent on OTAs for their revenue. While this is not necessarily a negative trend, hoteliers should avoid relying too much on this channel for it may hurt the hotels’ profitability. OTAs usually demand around 10-20% in direct commissions. Additionally, the rate parity agreement with OTAs limits the hotels’ pricing options.

The Hospitality industry increasingly appreciates the significance of personalisation in improving customer satisfaction and loyalty. As guests today are getting bombarded with information and offers from both hotels and online travel agencies (OTAs), personalised services could well be the ultimate goal that every Hotel aims to achieve.

This is a long and challenging journey; but hoteliers can start by understanding the fundamental principles and practices, as well as associated legal and ethical implications of hospitality personalisation.

Identifying the trends of our own industry in the year to come is very important. Technological trends that will significantly influence the industry are shaping the industry and forcing companies either to adopt the changes or be left behind. The hospitality industry is no exception, the top 3 technology trends you need to watch out for in 2016 are: