Adoption of Cloud by Hotel Industry

17 JAN 2019

Investment in technology must bring value to business whether it’s a large international hotel chain or a small, independent resort. The migration to cloud computing is expected to have a major impact on the way that information and computer resources are handled by the hotel industry. The hospitality industry is at “a tipping point in terms of cloud adoption”, with hoteliers expected to invest 7 – 8% more in cloud technology over the next 2 to 3 years. The current and future impact of cloud-based solutions is huge: it’s revolutionizing the way hoteliers run their businesses and interact with their customers.

The cloud is a highly adaptive IT infrastructure that can be shared by many different end users, each of whom might use it in very different ways. Cloud computing can dramatically lower the time and cost of entry to business for smaller firms trying to benefit from computer-intensive business applications that were originally available only to very large corporations.

Let’s take a look at some of the ways cloud-based technology is radically changing the way hoteliers run their hotels.

1) Reduces IT costs to half: Remember when you had to cough up a hefty sum for an annual software license and hardware installations, not to mention for things you may not have budgeted for, like bug patches and software updates? On-site hotel management software, managed by the hotel’s IT team, comes with considerable upfront, maintenance, and running costs.

2) Centralized infrastructure environment: It is highlighted that for a hotel’s IT department, cloud computing offers more flexibility in computing power, often at lower costs. With cloud computing, IT departments don’t have to engineer for peak-load capacity. Also, companies no longer have to purchase assets for infrequent intensive computing tasks or new hotel openings.

From hotels’ perspective, Barry L Shuler, CIO and IT Consulting Principal, Design Management Associates, and former Marriott CTO, said, “All major hotel chains will be moving to an infrastructure environment that is as “centralized” as possible, in terms of application software. Things like reservation systems and loyalty programmes have long been centralized. In the future, PMS, Revenue Management, Accounting, HR, and other systems will be centralized – or at the very least, probably three or fewer instances.”

3) Affordability: Cloud services can be purchased on demand basis. Due to this, hotels can avoid investments in hardware, maintenance cost, manpower cost to manage the infrastructure. They just need to pay for computing power and storage that they need.

4) On time delivery: With cloud, technology hotel management no longer experience the delay in deployment as service is ready to use from vendors who manage their IT infrastructure.

5) Reliability and security: With the cloud, hotels can store their data remotely instead of on-site of the hotel. In this way, management does not have to worry about the data if a natural disaster comes or security breach happens.

6) Flexibility to operate from anywhere anytime: The cloud gives you the flexibility to work from anywhere. So, the chain of hotels can use the cloud technology and can manage database, client’s requirement online from one single place to anywhere in the world.

Also, cloud computing helps you reduce downtime. That’s the reason hotel management and staff can keep guest happy efficiently.

So, if you are Hotelier who is always looking to improve your guest experience, better collaboration between the Staff and more importantly Security of your guest data, than adoption to cloud-based Software solution is the key to run businesses smartly and that is in tune with modern-day travelers, and more profitable.