By Bonnie Vesterfelt

Today, it’s common for hotels to not only look for industry partners that provide them access to a diverse breadth of travellers, but also access to the tools and technologies that will help them optimize their revenue and overall business. Business needs are evolving at the pace of today’s consumer, and by better leveraging technology-partner tools, hotels can drive deeper insights and establish efficiencies that will not only grow their business, but maximize occupancy and ADR and improve guest relations. With marketing, revenue management and competitive-insight tools now available to any property, the playing field has been leveled for all hotels, regardless of size.

The rapid pace of technology development, and its impact on the industry, will only continue to increase moving forward. The question remains: how hotels will seamlessly test and integrate new technologies, while also weathering uncertainty and addressing changing customer expectations. To find the answer, hotels need technology partners that can help them navigate the inevitable change, innovation and evolution so they can focus on what matters: delivering great customer experience and hitting customer-acquisition goals.

With a renewed focus on understanding how technology can help hotels address various challenges — including rising operating costs, increased competition, pressure on RevPAR growth and ever-changing customer expectations — hotels today are more receptive to conversations with technology partners. A true technology partner will listen to your hotel’s needs, while mobilizing its technical expertise to offer data-driven and tested technology solutions that can power your hotel’s performance. For example, Expedia Powered Technology was born from a series of “test-and-learns” with lodging partners to address their specific needs and pain points. From white-label offerings to revenue-management tools to guest-review insights, there are opportunities to streamline and drive efficiencies across all areas of operations.

Data also plays a key role in business optimization. Powered by machine learning, data can offer the necessary insights to help hotels identify areas of improvement, empowering them to make more informed pricing decisions, based on competition, compression and other market dynamics, to further optimize revenue. These types of insights will continue to evolve with the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI).

Revenue-management systems, such as Expedia Group’s Rev+, are designed to provide hotels with easy and quick access to these insights, with proven results. Of the more than 20,000 hotels that utilize Rev+, those hotels saw 20-per-cent faster revenue growth than hotels that weren’t using it and $20 million in incremental revenue. Despite these results, less than 15 per cent of the global hotel market uses revenue-management technology, presenting an untapped opportunity.

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