One theme emerges from conversations with hotel industry executives as they discuss their technology plans for 2021: Move fast. If 2020 had any lessons, it was that when circumstances change, you must adapt quickly or pay the price.
Here’s what leaders from Red Planet, IHG and Wyndham Hotels & Resorts are saying about their tech plans this year.
Tim Hansing, CEO, Red Planet Hotels
As the pandemic deepened across Asia, Bangkok-based Red Planet went into survival mode: “We retooled our IT system to create this very tight cost control,” CEO Tim Hansing said. Purchase orders jump through a series of approval hoops. “I approve every single expense. We managed to shut down and control expenses really fast, which was a really good thing, but we’re still going through that.”
Red Planet laid off about 150 of its 550 employees and closed many of its 32 hotels (all have since reopened). Already lean staffing at the budget hotels means heavier reliance on automation; each hotel, average size 167 rooms, is run with about nine staff, down from 12. “We were partway through introducing the automated check-in system that we then pushed forward and reduced the numbers of staff in the hotels, we think permanently,” Hansing said. “We had a good IT system in place, initially, and we just built on it. Moving forward, it’s all about more automation.”
In 2021, the focus shifts even more to the customer. “I think the only difference now that I’m looking at is how we connect with our customer and the sales and marketing function, because the digitization of the world has accelerated,” he said. “That does have implications, not only to back of house and check-in and check-out and apps … but it has implications on how we communicate to our customers.” He added, “The selling is going to be different.”
George Turner, chief commercial and technology officer, IHG
“We’ve learned a lot in 2020,” said George Turner, IHG’s chief commercial and technology officer, particularly around guest preferences. IHG is amping up the distribution of digital check-in across the U.S. and Canada; the goal is 5,000 hotels by the end of March. It also is adapting revenue management systems to guests who need more flexibility in booking, changing or refunding a reservation.
“The days of what I call huge capital projects in order to make massive changes over a period of time are probably long gone,” said Turner, who is based in Atlanta. “We’re having to now shift to a working model which says that we’re going to make small, impactful, incremental changes and add value to the business in a shorter timeframe.”
Speed to market is key. Early in the pandemic, when the company was deluged with customer calls, it leveraged cloud-based solutions and employee devices to allow more than 1,500 contact center agents to work from home. “Pre-COVID, I’d been told that we couldn’t do that,” Turner said. The transition took three weeks.
Tech investments require longevity and must give guests more options. “In 2021, we’re going to have to move faster than we’ve ever moved before,” he said. “We’ll be under pressure to do so – and probably even more pressure as a result of the fact that some things really had to pause in 2020 while we dealt with the challenges that we face from the pandemic.”
Turner’s priority is to continue focusing on how technology can contribute to “above-property solutions” – “areas where the hotel will not have to be concerned around, for example, taking reservations because the system is doing that for them, which allows people at the front desk to focus on the guests and not be distracted by other things which actually we can automate.”
Scott Strickland, chief information officer, Wyndham Hotels & Resorts
When the pandemic hit in early 2020, several technology initiatives that were internally focused on newly irrelevant were “crash-landed,” said Scott Strickland, New York-based CIO of Wyndham Hotels & Resorts. Projects that prioritized contactless communication, guest engagement and personalization of its 80 million-member database got attention.
In August, the company launched Wyndham Direct, which offers virtual card payment through direct channels and real-time access to individual traveler folios. Customers likely to stay at Wyndham’s budget brands, like Days Inn and Super 8, tend to be construction or crew workers who might not have a corporate card but who could now directly bill their company for the room.
The company also used more targeted offers, and intends to deliver a new mobile app this year. “We’re bringing features to the economy segment and the mid-scale segment that traditionally you would think are luxury features,” he says, such as mobile check-in and check-out, and contactless payment. There’s also an app for housekeepers as room-cleaning protocols have changed.
And there is the familiar lesson from 2020: “We’re working faster,” Strickland said. “That speed is something we didn’t have pre-COVID.” The speed is necessary for upcoming projects: The mobile app will introduce chat bots and a plug-in that will allow guests at higher-end resorts to see their rooms before they check in; a next-gen, cloud-based PMS system and a next-gen revenue management system will be introduced. “Offering our guests all the options in terms of how they want to engage with us is something that we’re accelerating into ‘21, as well,” Strickland said.