Critical strategic elements of hotel & hospitality
organization ICT plan
Within the hospitality industry, the
important of ICT plan is increasing day-by-day duo to the ever-changing and
highly competitive business market and globalization. As for hotel industry
ICTs is a useful tool or enabler to help arrive at the end goals. However the
most important thing is that organization managers must understand how to make
good use of the ICT strategic to solve management problems, serve business
needs, and find and created new development opportunities. ICTs can enable
organization to achieve and sustain competitive advantages and difference only
if certain critical elements are satisfied. Those ICT elements are as follows:
1.
Hospitality organization ICTs
must have clear vision, mission, objects and strategies
- Firstly, vision is a critical element for the hospitality organization. When the organization design this ICTs managers and strategy makers must clear about what their company want to be, what their culture and believe and their ultimate goals.
- Secondly, mission statement for the ICT plan is also the core of organization development and the application of their plan in real working process. The mission must include their long-term purpose or focusing (future analysis) and the way they are going to accomplish their purpose.
- Thirdly, as for the object, it is a relatively narrow and short-term goal that manager must know how to use the ICTs to make their objectives. It is necessary for managers to know what the problem company are facing and find out the challenging and opportunity for company to do to achieve competitive advantages.
- Last, the strategy in ICTs is the approaches for organization to turn the object in to reality. ICT strategies must be considering the firm’s capability as well as achievable and challenging.
Setting up clear vision, mission and
strategies in ICTs contribute much to the process of achieve company’s goal. In
our group, Four Seasons Hotels is a good success example in this aspect. Their
operating strategies, objects and vision are all close related to their
customer and employee focused mission and golden rule, that is why Four Seasons
could become the world’s leading luxury hotel brands.
2.
ICT situation (external &
internal) analysis
Hospitality organization make external and internal analyze before and during ICTs is very useful. Internal
analysis should include their resources, operation process, data and operating
performance of the internal audit and so on. Furthermore, the competitive SWOT analysis is also critical for
internal situation analysis. By analyzing companies’ strengths, weakness,
opportunities and threats, managers can combine organizations’ strategy with
internal resources and external environment well. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is a best strategy for achieving
competitive advantages through ICTs. While, external analysis is an important
process for company to find their external affecting and attracting factors. In
addition analyze and investigate stakeholders
needs, plan, interest, advantages and disadvantages, and make a stakeholders mapping is also important.
In our group, the four hotels’ ICTs have no
clear information about the situation analysis. However, this process is necessary
for each plan, which can make sure the dynamic and attractive of ICT plan and
come up with organizations’ strategy and market changes.
3.
ICTs should introduce the
unique innovative strategy or process
Nowadays, for most hospitality company, IT represent
one of the largest areas of capital expenditure and this trend will continue.
So it is crucial for firms especially the big chain company to seek new and creative ways and technology
to exploit opportunity and competitive
advantages. Here innovate means not only inside the hotel but also being
capable to dealing with outside
environment.
In our group, the four world-famous hotel
companies’ prime focus is making a strong web presence through a professional website. To market their services and products through
online media becomes equally important. Moreover, almost all the hospitality
players establish a proper online
reservation system. However, hospitality must seek ways to gain competitive
advantage through IT, such as Taj Hotels uses NEC
technology to give some guests sector low cost telephone room services and
Hilton Reservations & Customer care (HRCC), which is the best strategy for
Hilton to examines and meets the owners and guests need.
Those internal creative ICT strategies
increase the entry barriers, which
are hard for competitor to follow and keep out potential new competitors. That
is way ICTs strategy must be innovation to achieve competitive advantages.
Furthermore, setting goals and collecting feedback information is important for
innovation.
4.
Hospitality firms must be use
user friendly ICTs
When the company introduces the new
technology they must make sure that IT can better equip employees to be more
productive and capable. In this way, employees could do a better job to provide
high quality and high-efficiency service to customer, which can outperform
their competitor in the long-term development and gain more customers
share.
The
ICT must also be used to make the backend
functionality of the companies easy
and smooth. A common portal for employee management and all the hotels
management under same group will reduce the duplication of efforts and will bring down the response time and error
rate by the employees. Even the supply chain management activities can be done
using IT as e-procurement by the companies.
5.
Employee in-depth training program should be include in ICTs
With
the highly development of IT, various business intelligence software can analyze the performance of employees,
hotels management efficiency and generate patterns for their marketers to
target the potential customers. Furthermore, the employee trainings program can be made more efficient with
involvement of ICT in training programs and they can learn quickly without too
much of dependence on humans.
The
four hotel companies in our group: Four seasons, Starwood, Hilton and Taj Hotels, all provide the in-depth training program for their
employees before and during their work. By proving the training program can
make sure employees embraced hotel’s culture and mission. This is also a good
way for hotel to show their respect to
the employees. A reasonable training program not only can improve
employees’ working efficiency and professional knowledge but also can improve
their ability to deal with unexpected problem, especially when the problem
cannot be solved by IT automatically.
6.
ICTs must be control &
incorporate feedback
Control
is the action imperative of the organization
internal ICTs process, which will lead to management operation stability and continuity. When
organization implements the ICTs, they need to arrange responsible managers or
staffs to look at the feedback of their
ICT strategy. It is important that strategy makers understand how effective
the strategy to meet guests’ need and make sure whether or not companies
operation is come up with the strategy plan.
So, in ICTs control and feedback process,
Four Seasons hotels do best in focus on their CRMs. The feedback and analysis
can help organization solve problem in a short period, be able to identify the
requirement especially some of the critical require. Only in this way can hotel
improve their customers’ service quality.
7.
Cost and timeline are essential
requirements for a competitive ICTs
ICTs represent one of the largest areas of
hotels capital expenditure. So, ICTs should be used correctly and purposely, which is also must be able for hotel
to do things better, faster, cheaper and differently. It is important to
analyze their resources, requirement,
dedication and focus. Then making the
timetable of ICTs and planning their cost (hardware, software and fix-cost)
carefully and efficiently.
8.
Customer Relationship
Management (CRM) is one of the most important ICTs for hotel industry
Hotel as a services industry, customer is
the critical factor for their fate. The proper
customer relationship management is crucial for hotel to retain clients,
business and profit. CRM can help identify the best customer and creative a lot
of profit for the company.
The four hotels in our group are paying
more attentions to provide advanced services for customers. Take TAJ and Westin
as example, these two hotels use fancy facilities and considerate room
amenities to enhance old customers’
loyalty. But Hilton and Four seasons uses online tools to make conveniences
to customers. The ResMax™ Program, Hilton Reservations & Customer Care
(HRCC) in Hilton and CRMs in Four Seasons are perfect examples for this point.
Of course, retraining employees and efficient feedbacks are important ways
for hotels to accomplish their mission. As for this, Four seasons Hotels set a
good example for other hotels.
In
all, ICT will play a major role in whole hospitality industry in immediate
future, as lots of travel planning companies needs an integration of their
search platform with existing hotel’s web portals. Although
it is costly but worthwhile to apply it to hotel even other industry. Without ICT
strategic plan, the survival for those companies in hospitality sector will
become an extremely difficult task. So an intelligent ICT strategy is a must
for the success of Hotels and Resorts all around the world, if they want to
keep the competitive advantages in this hospitality industry.
References
- Implications of the ICT revolution for business and strategy, E-tourism. Available from: <https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1MVCLTEl4QTSuyJG5FYiCp5OPvdxJOg5MHazhzbSLkQ8/edit#slide=id.i0>. [18 March 2013]
- Nyheim, PD & Connolly, DJ 2012, Technology strategies for the Hospitality Industry, 2nd edn, Prentice Hall /Pearson Education, New Jersey, Ohio.
- Shanker, D 2008, ICT and Tourism: Challenges and Opportunities, Conference on Tourism in India-Challenges Ahead, IIM Kozhikode, pp. 50-58. Available from: <http://dkc.engo.in/files/2012/02/ICT-and-Tourism-Challenges-and-Opportunities.pdf>. [10 March 2013]
- Whitelaw, Paul A 2012, ICT and Hospitality Operations, Handbook of Hospitality Operations and IT, Chapter 8.
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