HOSPA Webinar - 22nd July 2020

Can hospitality deliver a human touch in a contactless world?

Can hospitality deliver a human touch in a contactless world? See what Tom Rimmer Director of Technology at Ennismore and Alan O'Riordan co-founder at Apaleo think when they chat with Tristan Gadsby and Andrew Pirret from Alliants.

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ATTENDEES

• (JP) Jane Pendlebury - CEO, HOSPA

• (TG) Tristan Gadsby - CEO of Alliants

• ​(AP) Andrew Pirret - VP of Product at Alliance

• (TR) Tom Rimmer - Director of Technology for Ennismore

• (AR) Alan O'Riordan - Co-Founder of Apaleo

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Agenda

00:00 Introductions 

JP introduces herself and the rest of the attendees. JP touches on the easing of coronavirus social distancing in the UK and the reopening of some, but not all hotels, restaurants and pubs.

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• 1:00-2:43 Guests introduce themselves.

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• 2:45 JP: I’m going to start with a question for Tristian, now that the industry is starting to reopen what should hoteliers consider as part of their recovery strategy?

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• TD: Difficult as it’s never happened before, travel has never been impacted in this way. I was actually working at British Airways in 2001 and saw that and then obviously the financial crisis of 2008, but it is very difficult to try and determine exactly what to do. But there are certain things we can learn from the past. Harvard business actually did a very good study back in 2010 which looked at the past 3 recessions and found that in 4700 companies that the most successful companies did a real mix between defensive strategy, things like cost-cutting, and offensive strategy, with things like agility (how can businesses become more agile and adaptive to change) and therefore take advantage of the opportunities which do present themselves as we go through. What that means for hotels is that not only is there a focus on the short-term goals of cost-cutting that clearly needs to take place and technology can help in many ways to do that whether that’s through helping drive efficiencies in the property or central services through to actually getting yourself set up for success. As travellers and domestic travel grow in proportion those are the sorts of things that companies need to try and attract, how do you attract that audience opposed to others? Those are the sorts of things we think hoteliers can do. Technology can help do this but we have to go back to the core values of hospitality, delivering the great experience for the customer, irrespective of how busy or empty properties are or how many staff there are. 

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• 5:47 JP: Picking up on that point you made about technology, Tom, how can hoteliers leverage technology to build trust and develop one to one relationships?

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• TR: From our side, it’s about that communication with the guest. Traditionally, we’ve taken a low tech approach to how we operate, in some respects we aren’t behind the curve but we are cautious about what technology we put in front of the guest. As we look as to the way we are settling into the new world we will probably look very closely at two areas of communications: the direct communications between the guests and the property is now key- does anyone want to pick up a telephone in the room or have a front desk experience? How can we circumvent these typically high touch experiences and make them safer for the guests in our property? We will look to do the same in our food and beverage as well, how do we create a low touch environment in food and beverage which maintains a welcome feel? 

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• 7:13 JP: Yep, definitely a difficult balance. Alan, how can hoteliers increase their efficiency of the operation during their time?

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• AP: To add from what Tom said, we must be careful that technology does not take away from the human experience. From a technology perspective, we will finally embrace it in the right way, as an enabler. But not something that will take over from humans - robots - never going to get to that stage, it wouldn’t be hospitality if we had robots running it. But Tom’s examples that he suggested there in terms of communication with the guests and the F&B experience and using tech to support that I think is absolutely spot on. In terms of the efficiency of the operation, it is an unfortunate reality that hotels will have to shine a light on their costs for the foreseeable future. Looking at the same level of guest satisfaction with less staff and they need to look at that of course and other day to day costs. Some of our customers and prospective customers have actually used this downtime to look at how they use tech. And I think particularly when it comes to the legacy systems, they still dominate the eco-systems, but there is definitely a possibility for improvement. When it comes to the legacy systems I think you just need to look at a review of the core legacy systems at the centre of your operation. Look at the capability of those legacy systems: in light of this new landscape we are emerging into are they capable of integrating quickly to contactless solutions? Can they do that at no cost or low cost? Can they do it quickly enough for you? Can that revised landscape deliver that guest expectation and quickly? In terms of efficiency, are our legacy systems now overkill? A lot of them are very mature and have been around for a while or maybe less relevant in a post coronavirus context. All of that needs to be considered in the context of cost as well. There was a study recently that said that 56% of the average hotels IT budget went on vendor support contracts and making of contracts, which doesn’t leave an awful lot for innovation. So, it’s certainly a time to look at the new cost as well, and that’s really because some of the new cloud solutions that are out there are much more nimble and innovative and easier to adopt and implement, and tend to cost less. To summarise this, I think you can look at it from two sides, one is from a back office and staff perspective such as automated payment which also helps with the guest experience not having to go to the front desk and eliminates human error in that sense. But also, we’ve seen people who look at CRM very seriously now, they really want that 360 view of the guest. Business intelligence and analytics also becomes increasingly important for monitoring trends. Even housekeeping, there’s a hotel in Houston, which I’m not suggesting we want to go down this route completely, that basically has robots doing deep cleaning on all the rooms, might be a little extreme, but for some hotels, there’s a case for that. Then just, of course, the guest experience with online check in and check out- are kiosks still relevant? Is there a hygiene concern there? Could guests do everything on their mobile phone now? The solutions are out there to support this. To reiterate what Tom said, to give the guests choices that they don’t have to come to the front desk if they don’t want to.

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• 12:38 JP: A comprehensive answer there Alan! Tristan, with all the data we are collecting, what’s the best way hoteliers can use that and assist in the current crisis?

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• TD: So there are many sources of data that people can use. Everything from trends we can gather from the web, data from their own websites, all the way through to some of the industry insights which exist. In the hospitality industry we are lucky with the amount of data that’s out there, I think, more importantly, it’s actually when you mix all of those sources together you really start to cover those insights. Alan touched on it with CRM and some of the ways that people are considering the loyalty side of this as well. But the data in CRM systems often sit there and never really gets uncovered or used. And that’s actually the important part, how are you really going to use that data in the future? So if we look at some of the scenarios here, we’ve got very loyal guests that are loyal to the brand, but who are those guests? How should we be looking after them during this period? What was their profile before they stopped travelling? How are we going to bring them back? We tend to be a very room focused industry, we don’t necessarily think about all the other things around a guest's journey. You have to understand all the different elements of data, making sure you not only combine the room’s data, but also F&B, activities, and all the other ways you can actually start to monetize that guest. Not only do we need to look and find the pockets of travellers we also need to make sure we are bringing back loyal and very profitable guests. We help a number of customers plug together on all of those data sources, the great news these day is that you can do that a lot more cost-effectively and there are very many good cloud-based analytics platforms out there and with the right knowledge you can start to plug it together very quickly to unlock the value that often sits within them. We probably only use 5% of the data that gets generated in hospitality today, actually, if we moved it more towards 50^% and 100% there are huge pockets of value. 

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• 16:30 JP: Brilliant. Thanks, Tristan. So I know Alan, you mentioned some of the options hoteliers can do to digitise the guests' experiences and their processes to thrive post-crisis, do you have anything to add Andrew?

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• AR: There’s a massive complexity around the different processes. An F&B process is very different from a check-in process. Check is very process-driven and more simplistic, and I think as hotels are going through this change to be contactless, looking at those process-driven ones are quick easy wins and you can take advantage of that. Alan, I think you’re right: payments, mobile keys, and there are hotels apps that have been there for years. So a hotel app isn’t something new, but we are only getting people downloading a few apps every month, it’s not going to fundamentally shift because of COVID. So I think people are going to have to very much take an omnichannel approach - as Tom mentioned, messaging needs to be in there - can an app do it in this way? Going back to what Tristian said, making it guest-centric. I think one of the interesting pieces will be with track and trace, we need to move away from a reservation-based knowledge of who our guests are, who are the occupants of the room? There are lots of people now starting to look at CRMS and actually is the PMS efficient? We may need to move up a layer. But I think, don’t lose the humanity in the process and slowly chip away at it. This will continue for a significant period and we’ve still got the consolation of the hotel's operational roles. We are unlikely to have as many staff, who are now going to have to operate more systems, which adds more support tickets and efforts.

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• TR: I think with more systems we see more data, the more data you have the less likely you are going to know what to do with it. We’ve been doing some soul searching about whether we want that PMS to be that true source of information for our guests. If you’re looking at F&B data, it doesn’t always touch the PMS. We’d like to know the preferences of our guests as they arrive on-site, so we can say go to the bar grab a nice glass of red and we will send you a link to check-in remotely or check-in in a safe way. We are exploring how we utilise data from multiple resources and I think on the one exercise we have done in the last 6 months which we’ve had more time to think about is drill down what sort of questions we need to ask. What do we need to know about the guest to bring a next-level experience? It’s probably only a list of 10-15 questions for your property, such as what is their lifetime spend? What are their preferences of the guest? How often are they staying with us? What are they worth to us in terms of offers? Once you get down to that level, this can help the market to or retain business. We are at an early stage of ideas and plans. I think for us it will be a mixture of build and buy, what can be done in house and what can be done by a third party. And I think a lot of hoteliers will be doing the same. One final point around the cost from my side, will be a trend we started to see a few months ago, was forward-thinking vendors coming to us saying how can we help? And in some of those examples, some of those vendors have been able to deliver us occupancy-based pricing, which is hugely helpful especially when occupancy is at a fraction of what we are used to. 

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• AR: I think that’s completely right. This is the time for technology vendors to step up, making sure that we are supporting the industry and benefit the business. That’s where Alan and the team have hit a trend there.

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• TD: I think another thing is we’ve started to see is that for many years we’ve been guilty of being room-centric. This event will be the catalyst for being customer-centric. The systems need to be set up for that. There is going to be a need for change, and certainly, with conversations with our customers, it’s been a chance to rethink those underlying systems so we don’t end in a situation where staff have 26 screens to look at. Actually we need to make it much simpler for them. I think the other thing to touch on is that as hotels have started to reopen, with our guest messaging solution, messages per customer has increased 3 times over that period. So we know the need for human connection is still there, they are just using different channels. So as an industry we need to be cautious to bring those customer needs and deliver that great guest experience. I know Jane was telling us earlier about a recent stay she had were a lot of the human contact seemed to disappear, so as an industry we need to find a way to bring that back. 

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• 24:20 JP: Absolutely. We’ve got a comment here from Andrew Evers, whom I think many of you will know from Red Carnation, picking up on Andrew, your point, saying that unavailable not useful data is definitely the issue of the day. And now is a great opportunity to gather more data, especially on your F&B guests that you previously didn’t get the data from but now you have to. I’ve also heard it’s been said that hotels are clapping their hands with delight about the Sunday morning breakfasts, that they can now just tell them what time they’re coming in.

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• TR: Just to put a bit of a point on that, we are big believers in being transparent about what we do with the data. Part of the idea of us utilising data will be the value proposition of retaining that data. If we ask somebody for their phone, email and address we need a reason. This is obvious for reservation, but with F&B that’s a different world entirely. We are very careful to ensure we are asking these questions for a reason and to add value to the guest experience, as opposed to ingesting data for data’s sake. This is when it becomes a little bit less friendly and more sinister. It needs to be transparent about why you’re using it, then people will be willing to hand it over.

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• TD: Tom is right. Once we have permission to use that data and where that data ends up, we also as an industry need to have much more open standards. I think we’ve talked about open APIS before, but just taking FMB as an example, a lot of that data was previously locked up. The particular vendors that we're capturing that data weren’t sharing that data with you, and so actually this model is absolutely right for a change. People are starting to recognise how exactly they need to operate in this new world. It is changing. It is time for us to work much better together to share data between systems and make sure we can join those up and deliver a great experience for customers, more than ever before, as we will have fewer opportunities for the next few years to impress guests over the next few years.

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• AR: I would probably like to add that there are probably people on this webinar who are thinking this all sounds well and good but also sounds complex and very expensive. Traditionally these opportunities might have been more available for bigger hotels, and whilst there may still be a gap that gap is certainly closing. There are definitely solutions out there that connect very well together at a low cost but can deliver that kind of experience for independent hotels and smaller hotels too. Don’t be put off by the perceived cost of this compared to traditional system projects. The world has changed very rapidly over the last 2 or 3 years, cloud-based systems are the low cost per room per month and typically integrations should not be chargeable anymore. No matter what sized hotel you are, certainly worth doing. 

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• 29:05 JP: Great, I’ve also heard it on the grapevine that certain newer cloud-based systems are much more efficient at changing the VAT than some of the older ones! So, worth looking at. 

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• 29:45 JP closes webinar:

• Right, we have actually used our full half an hour. So I would like to say thanks to everyone for listening and to remind you that the advice shared today is general and shouldn’t be assumed to be right in every situation. If you do need any formal advice, please contact me and I can put you in touch with any of today’s experts or indeed many experts in other areas of hospitality. And a very big thank you to Tristian, Andrew, Tom and Alan for all their solid advice and for sharing their experiences today.