Dear Customers,

Moore's law describes a long-term trend, in which the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. The law is named after Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore, who described the trend in his 1965 paper. The paper noted that number of components in integrated circuits had doubled every year from the invention of the integrated circuit in 1958 until 1965 and predicted that the trend would continue "for at least ten years". Even today, his prediction has proved to be uncannily accurate, and the law is now used in the IT industry as a whole to guide long-term planning for research and development.

The hospitality industry, in comparison to other sectors such as Finance, Manufacturing and Telco has surprisingly remained static all through these years. Take Finance and manufacturing sectors, the software systems deployed today is a paradigm shift compared to 10 years ago. Unfortunately, that is not visible in the hospitality industry which still carries out daily routines based on old technology, which of course, can be done in a smarter and quicker way using tomorrow’s technology. Cindy Estis Green, a 2009 inductee to HFTP’s International Hospitality Technology Hall of Fame has this to say, "Everybody has legacy systems in place: POS, accounting, telephone systems — a spaghetti network of systems. However, it’s hard to find out about customers because of the mishmash of systems. For example, spa use is often in a standalone system and not fully linked into a PMS or CRS system".

There are still hotels that are being run manually. It is not just happening in small sub 20 room’s hotel but even in 3 star hotels that boast up to 200 rooms. Nevertheless, maybe because of budget constraints or resistance to technology, they will not know the other side of optimizing operations and achieving cost efficiency and revenue maximizations. In our experience, we have also come across medium sized hotels using entry level software suited to small hotels that do not meet the functional requirements. Saving 30-40% in costs has its down side. It takes one unscrupulous manager to know the system faults or control weaknesses to take advantage. The 30-40% saving could be wiped out in no time. The saddest part is, the owner may never know.

Some have pulled out of the crowd and apply technology to automate processes and compute data analysis and reap the rewards. As a wise owner, you would most probably be thinking about issues that are much more relevant such as optimizing rates real time as the clock ticks, managing distribution in a systematic order and building a central guest database for multi-properties. Check-in, check-out, housekeeping and call-centre reservations are a thing of the past especially when Internet booking is growing at such an astonishing rate. Online hotel bookings in 2002 clocked at just over USD 6.2 billion and that figure is expected to be double digits in 2012, once the economy recovers. It is just not Front Office module as the deciding factor. Many industry standard software vendors are pestering their customers to upgrade to the latest versions with higher costs when upgrading only means spending extra money to have a few additional features that hoteliers most probably may not even use.

Before you consider upgrading your system, you might want to research what technology has to offer. Recent advances in IT such as Service Oriented Architecture has made it possible to fuse distribution, revenue optimization and a central depository database all together without having interface hassles and keeping the cost of ownership low. Interface is a word of the past while these concepts mentioned above will be all integrated into one single module, by a single vendor and hosted on the cloud platform. These issues have now been answered and we are talking about effectively and uniformly deploying revenue management, web reservation, CRM, GDS, OTA’s, Business Intelligence and Credit Card Interface across a chain of hotels. So, when you decide to change why not drop us an email and ask what’s next for this industry in terms of innovation? We will be more than happy to show you our momentohs® Central Reservation Office (CRO) and the wonders it can do to your hotel. It is a rule changing journey and one that promises to be the next generation central reservation unmatched by any in the market today.

Mehboob Hamza
(mehboob@sscomp.ae)