42 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2015 HOTELIER hoteliermagazine.com

TECHNOLOGY

In this age of BYOD (bring-your-own device), smartphones, tablets and wearables confirm software improvements

are a growing necessity in hospitality. So, stay tuned as five gurus from across the country weigh in on the changing tech landscape and tell us how hotels are accommodating guests’ needs to connect on their own terms. The panel includes Warren Dehan,

president at Northwind Canada Inc. in Markham, Ont.; Warren Markwart, principal of MK2 Hospi-tality in Toronto; Blair Reid, manager of Property IT, North America for Starwood Hotels & Resorts in Toronto; Walid Salem, VP of Information Technology at Silver-Birch Hotels & Resorts in Vancouver; and Sean Shannon, GM of Expedia Canada in Toronto.

HOTELIER: How will technology change the hotel landscape in the next five years?

Warren Dehan: The front desk

will be a secondary thought to guest interac-

tions. Guests will check in

online, pick up their key at an automated station or use their mobile device to open doors, fulfilling their on-property needs digitally from their devices. Interac-tions with hotel staff will be less about function and more about service. We already have one client in a Northwest wine area removing their front desk and turning it into a wine-tasting area and breakfast bar.

Sean Shannon: Another

consider-ation for hotels will be continu-

ing to offer additional

value. According to our mobile survey, travellers selected Wi-Fi accessibility as the top perk at hotels with 56 per cent of travel-lers worldwide stating Wi-Fi availability impacts their purchasing decision. Our survey findings rein-force that hotels must continue listening to what

consumers request, includ-ing the ability to connect to their online world at all times without any additional costs.

HOTELIER: Which innovations will help save money?

WD: All of them. One area we’ve been experiment-ing in with our partner HeBS Digital (based in New York) is recovery features through the online channel. This will not only save money but is designed to increase revenue. Research across our portfolio shows 95 per cent of website visitors abandon the reservation process. [Hotels can] regain that lost revenue with our reservation conversion optimization tools (pop-up windows with exclusive offers, targeted emails, et cetera) designed to help target guests that show an interest in your property.

SS: [Expedia’s free travel] app will often feature mobile-exclusive savings and deals, allowing travel-lers to save even more when they book in the palm of their hand. Earlier this year we introduced Media Lounge, the latest addition to the Expedia App for iPhone or iPod touch. With Media Lounge, users will have the opportunity to download free premium content at the beginning of each month. Furthermore, the

DO YOU COMPUTE?Five industry aces dish about staying on the cutting edge of today’s changing technological landscape

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Expedia Media Lounge also recommends [curated] content (both free and paid) to help customers with their travels.

HOTELIER: How are hotels accommodating the demand for Wi-Fi?

Warren Markwart: Hotels are

struggling with the business model for

providing free Wi-Fi, and they

are trying to understand if free and quality Wi-Fi is a competitive advan-tage. Guests are making purchasing decisions [based] on whether a hotel has free Wi-Fi or not. Most hotels’ Wi-Fi networks are overloaded, with guests travelling with multiple devices and using stream-ing services such as Spotify and Netflix. Many hotels are adopting two-tier Wi-Fi access: the free Wi-Fi is for email and standard web-page browsing, and if you want faster speed and more bandwidth, the guest has to purchase a premium service.

HOTELIER: How are hotels engaging millennials and meeting their technology needs?

WM: Communication on their terms and schedule is how millennials look at interaction with fellow

humans, and it’s all by thumb typing on a minia-ture keyboard. The actual technology in a hotel will continue to grow to meet the expectation of millen-nials. The challenge is for hotels [to adapt] to a non-verbal method of communication in a business that is about guest service. Blair Reid: New technolo-gies like Google Glass, Apple Watch and mobile

platforms continue to be where millen-nials are

accessing and interact-

ing with our brands. We saw this with the demand for mobile, keyless check-in. As well, being active and engaged in these channels is in line with the lifestyle of our guests. This is especially true of our tech-savvy, elite SPG members who are more likely to download our app, book via mobile, partici-pate in ratings and reviews, link their Facebook profile to SPG, et cetera. One in four Platinum Members live a truly mobile lifestyle.

HOTELIER: How are tablets changing the way hotel employees use technology?

WM: The obvious area hotels are looking at using tablets in is their restau-rants and bars, for servers taking orders. House-keeping is where there is the greatest advantage, managing housekeep-ing employees and tasks, from real-time delivery and modification of room

assignment to instant communication of ready-to-rent rooms.

Walid Salem: You don’t always want to be tethered to your computer to make

decisions; you may want to see it from your dashboard from

home or you may want

to see it on your mobile device in a meeting, which would include a tablet. Whether it’s a tablet or a smartphone or a connected laptop, Wi-Fi and Ethernet, at the end of the day it’s all the same — it’s portable. And it’s the data you’re bringing to the portable device that is more impor-tant than the device itself.

HOTELIER: What techno-logical innovations have you adopted?

BR: Soon everyone’s smart-phone and SPG App will be the remote control for their Starwood experi-ence. SPG Keyless allows guests to check in and use their smartphone or Apple Watch as a key. Travellers are more tech-savvy than ever before, and wearable technology is the newest platform that provides information in an easy-to-access way to support the needs of our guests and enhance their travel experience. The [SPG] app for Google Glass empow-ers mobile travellers with a new view as they explore destinations and book stays at hotels around the world. The experience enables guests to review their SPG account and

immerse themselves in any of Starwood’s nine brands.

HOTELIER: Should hotels embrace the cloud?

WD: Our first advice is to choose a product [based] on its ability to satisfy the operational needs of the property; the deployment technology should be secondary. A cloud-based system that can’t help the hotel run effectively is a wasted investment. Once the operational needs are met, then a cloud-based offering is a great solution to minimize infrastructure costs and ongoing mainte-nance. [But] depending on the size of the property, and its entire IT requirements, a cloud-based offering may be more expensive over time than an on-premise solution. The property must also consider the quality of [its] Internet connectivity and the cost of implement-ing a redundant connection should the primary connec-tion fail. [At Northwind we are] of the mind that both solutions may work equally well, and it’s the specifics of the property that will dictate the better choice.

WM: Hotels spend a lot of money maintaining central servers to hold and manage data. The advantage of cloud-computing is that it reduces the amount of technology support a hotel requires and places data in a very secure place. Convinc-ing senior hotel executives of this is difficult in light of the Target and Home Depot data breaches in 2014.

WS: Over 99 per cent of our infrastructure is virtu-alized, but cloud-based

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services are not for every-one. When we looked at it earlier on, it didn’t make sense financially. Now it does. The prices have come down quite a bit. There are so many benefits: it reduces the amount of human management that you need to manage the hardware, because it’s sitting somewhere else; another party manages it; it reduces your investment on the actual hardware. The other benefit is sheer reliability. There are multi-ple centres, and your data is backed up. Data privacy is an issue. You have to be careful what [you] put in the cloud. Proprietary data, confidential data is not sitting necessarily in the cloud and, if it is, then it’s very well protected. Right now, there’s still a place for on-premise [data storage], but we measure that carefully.

HOTELIER: How are hotels protecting themselves against data breaches?

WD: [This] is not a finite task but an ongoing effort. From software that is PA-DSS (payment-application-data-security-standard) compliant, to PCI (payment-card indus-try) compliance at the property level helping with some security, credit-card

and personal information will always be at risk of disclosure. Improved securi-ty features such as credit-card tokenization and new methods of guest payment will help secure data.

WM: Hotels managed by chains that have large central technology depart-ments do a good job at maintaining policies and systems to prevent data breaches. Small indepen-dent hotels and franchise hotels are at great risk of data breaches. The biggest exposure they have is establishing Internet access on PCs in their hotel, which opens up access to their data from anyone who has access to the Internet. A hotel must maintain up-to-date software, poli-cies and procedures.

BR: Providing a safe environment for our guests and protecting our guests’ personal informa-tion is the essence of our business. This is why, when we introduce new programming like SPG Keyless, we [do] not use an off-the-shelf software platform. Instead, we create the software and hardware hand-in-hand with our partners.

WS: We’re PCI-certified. We’ve got a third party that works with us to continually assess [it], and we do both internal and external penetration testing. Where guest data exists, we have encrypted databases. We don’t hold credit cards anymore, outside of a couple of properties because of branding, but those are tokenized. The best thing

a company can do is reduce the footprint of carrying any credit-card information.

HOTELIER: How is technology impacting the bottom line?

WM: In an industry that is very service-oriented, technology innovations and application will result in significant labour savings — particularly in housekeep-ing, which is productivity driven and uses procedures and systems that have not changed significantly in decades. The advantage that technology will bring is a more consistent level of service, especially when dealing with peak service times.

BR: Starwood’s investment and focus on mobile is paying off; mobile bookings are growing five times faster than the annual growth rate of the web channel 10 years ago.

WS: We know we will save labour costs by going to a consolidated system, one where we can see how our employees are spending their time. You cannot get there from a data analy-sis standpoint without software. I would say the time and attendance system and the ability to view data and analyze it is where the cost savings comes in. We’ve done a return on invest-ment that clearly shows the payback for implementing this technology. u

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