We’ve covered the SMAC Stack – Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud – from a few different angles, including the future of guest management. In this final post, we’ll look at everything else.
In the face of The Digitization of Everything, if there’s one advantage hotel operators have it’s that hotels exist as physical spaces. You can’t spend the night on Google, and even Amazon hasn’t figured out a way to ship a hotel room from Seattle to a traveler’s final destination.
Those physical spaces require a lot of work to maintain, which ends up being yet another area where SMAC principles can help property owners improve their operations.
Within the hotel, advanced analytics can highlight potential trouble areas. A spike in the monthly water bill might mean higher occupancy – or it could indicate a leaky sprinkler head the maintenance team hasn’t noticed. A maid with a smartphone can alert management to a dangerously small stockpile of toilet paper.
Something as minor as a dip in the number of key cards returned could be the canary in the coal mine on morning crew issues at the front desk. (Or it might just mean you need a better sign on the “Return Keys Here” box.)
Guest reviews are one way to obtain feedback, but how cool would it be if your staff was alerted every time someone mentioned your property on Twitter, as in “Leaky faucet at BLANK Airport Inn driving me CRAZY!!”
Monthly reports are great, but if reservations from a particular online site were to suddenly drop by half, a real-time alert would allow you to evaluate the issue before too much damage is done.
As I’ve discussed throughout this series, it’s easy to imagine the way the future might look, but harder to build it in a way that gives end users exactly what they want, without spurious features that don’t help them run their businesses.
That’s why SkyTouch has a collaborative, user-driven development model. Our team brings more than 1,000 combined years of hospitality experience to the table, so we’re not starting from scratch, but we treat customer input as the most important input into our process.
By collecting feedback and voting on ideas through our online user community, over 60 percent of our new features have come from customers. It’s our goal to be more than just a provider of services – but a true partner in our customers’ businesses.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this series of posts and in the same spirit of collaboration, if there’s another topic you’d like to see us cover, please leave a comment below or contact us at any time. We’d love to hear from you.
