What is HosTech?
Hospitality Technology (HosTech) focuses on the technology used primarily within the four sectors (as per Birmingham Business School) that make up the vast industry: Food and Beverage, Accommodation, Travel & Tourism and Entertainment.
HosTech also refers to the technology innovations created by suppliers and operators within the hospitality industry.
What do customers expect from HosTech?
For it to work, for value and for flexibility.
Hospitality caters for such a wide range of customer from business to families, and further categorised by location and purpose of visit. Accommodation at an airport serves a different purpose to accommodation by the coast.
Similar to airlines and retail, the customer will drive the expectation of their experience determined by what they are willing to pay. The technology needs to reflect the offering.
What happened during the pandemic?
During Covid-19 the hospitality sector was one of the most negatively affected. Restaurants, hotels and event spaces had to close which had in most cases never been thought of as something that could happen. Some hotels stayed open to help support the NHS and other key workers, which was positively received but also came with operational challenges.
Eat Out To Help Out was popular among the public but for hospitality who had to serve customers with a disrupted supply chain and a limited number of staff, it was a struggle to deal with demand.
Track & Trace in the UK was a controversial obligation that hospitality had to provide a solution for with convoluted guidance from the government. This put additional pressure on operations to ensure customers were following, often people didn’t want to hand over their data. With data being the hottest asset to own nowadays, if collected for Track & Trace it couldn’t be used for any other reason such as marketing purposes or upselling.
Technology accelerated by up to 10 years during the pandemic and hospitality being one of the hardest hit had to find funds to stay competitive in a new normal of F&B deliveries over sit-in’s, but at the same time struggling to pay property rent bills.
It was a tough time in hospitality and as we start to pull out of the pandemic, how the industry continues to adapt to the new normal and how technology plays a part in that will be closely watched. The silver lining is that whilst air travel still had a lot of testing restrictions up until Feb 2022, hospitality has seen a spike in “stay-cations” as people are desperate to get out of their 4 lockdown walls whenever a lockdown period has ended.
What’s next for HosTech?
Hospitality exists for the need of the customer and the majority of tech trends in the industry focuses on making the lives of customers easier and more efficient.
There is such a wide demographic of customer in the industry, that companies have got to be careful to not alienate a segmentation. This is where tech is needed not as a gimmick but in the background to facilitate.
There has been amazing use of technology to drive innovations in HosTech: robotics automating tasks , AI driven digital signage and virtual reality training.
But the best of what’s to come, will be innovations that use technology to drive efficiency for the employee and customer in the new normal.
