Digital Disruptions vs. Digital Transformation and What it means for the Future of Hotels
Digital disruption represents a transformation that is caused by emerging digital technologies and business models. These innovative new technologies and models can impact the value of existing products and services offered in the hotel industry.
Digital transformation represents a process where people and technology work in harmony to transform existing traditional and non-digital processes and services or create new ones. Today this is a process that completely alters the way hotels are managed and operated, and how value is delivered.
Digital disruptions are an outside-in process while digital transformation is an inside-out process.
In this article, we will take a look at how hotels can shape a new future through digital disruptions and digital transformation.
Digital Disruptions vs. Digital Transformation and What it means for the Future of Hotels
For the hotel industry Airbnb often is referred to as digital disruption. Airbnb represents a system that takes advantage of human and technology innovations.
Airbnb was able to create a hotel industry turbulence induced by digital innovation that lead to the erosion of boundaries and approaches that previously served as foundations for the products, services an,d capture of value for the hotel industry.
What Airbnb did was that they understood the value of people and technology working in harmony. First, they created a product that tapped into new uncontested markets. They started with an outside-in approach and then got people onboard that believed in their vision.
From this point, they started creating a community that believed in their vision. Once they had a community that believed in their vision that is when they started their inside-out process.
It is the combination of digital disruptions and digital transformation that today is reshaping the hotel industry.
Technology disruption
Many people today say that technology is disrupting the hotel industry. To some point, I agree. But before we can define it as a true disruption there has to be enough people that believe in the technology.
These people need to be inspired so they tell their community about the technology. Once you have enough people believe in the technology you reach a tipping point and that is when it becomes a disruption.
For hotels today is most important to understand people first. It always starts with building a relationship and making friends first.
Once people trust and believe in your new technology for your hotel that is when you need to start working on your digital transformation frameworks.
The Future of Hotels
Looking at some of the current digital disruptions there are a lot of interesting trends for the hotel industry to pay attention to.
Guest room experience
We see a lot of new technology today that allows customers to customize their guest room experience.
A lot of hotels today struggle with the personalization of the customer experience. Interactive technology will help hotels in creating more unique personalized guest room experiences.
Data lakes Today a lot of hotels operate within data silos. PMS, POS, reputation management systems, forecast and budgeting, and OTA data exist within different structures.
Data lakes or cloud-based systems are built on centralized data where all data goes through a central cloud-based location. This gives hotels an opportunity to store the data retrieved from multiple locations and use queries to start to combine the data to discover more correlations and effective data usage.
Cybersecurity It has become essential for hotels today to protect their data and the integrity of their business.
Cybersecurity mesh is among the most robust architecture today that integrates widely distributed and disparate security services.
Cybersecurity mesh architecture (CSMA) advocates interoperability and coordination between individual security products, resulting in a more integrated security policy. This bolsters the security of an organization by protecting individual endpoints, instead of attempting to protect all assets with a singular technology. CSMA is designed to help hotels move away from obsolete standalone systems and toward an integrated approach.
Decision Intelligence Decision intelligence is a unique approach to improving your hotels decision-making. By modeling each decision as a set of processes, using intelligence and analytics to inform, learn from and refine decisions.
The best part of decision intelligence is that it supports and enhances human decision-making. And this will improve automated processes, augmented analytics, and AI with the help of chatbots.
Hyper automation Automation by itself has been a major digital disruption for hotels. The next step is hyper-automation.
This is a process that rapidly identifies, vets, and automates any business and IT process. This will enable scalability, remote operation, and hotel business model disruption.
Disrupted Enterprise Disrupted enterprise is a model that truly supports building relationships and making friends first. This is a model that reflects a digital-first, remote-first business model to improve employee experience, digital customer experience, partner touchpoints, and build-out service and product experiences.
Total Experience Digital transformation is a process designed to integrate the employee and customer journey with the help of technology. When humans and technology work in harmony that it becomes a collaboration that works to enhance every experience.
The total experience is a strategy that integrates employee experience, customer experience, user experience, and multi-experience across multiple touchpoints to amplify growth.
Three key areas of Digital Transformation within Hotels
As indicated digital disruption is an outside-in process. Digital transformation is an inside-out process which means this is how hotels respond to digital disruption.
1. Employee and Customer Experience Start implementing processes to better understand employees and customers in more detail, use technology to fuel employee happiness and customer growth, and work together with employees to create more customer touchpoints.
2. Hotel operational processes Through collaboration with both employees and customers start improving internal processes by leveraging digitization and automation, enable employees with digital tools, and collect new data to monitor performance and make more effective and strategic business decisions.
3. Hotel business model One of the most important aspects of digital transformation is collaboration. We know customers today want to work with hotels, not just have hotels work for them. This leads hotels today to start transforming their business model by augmenting new experience offers with digital tools and services and introducing digital products and services.
The benefits of digital transformation;
- Cost-effectiveness – increase happiness and productivity while reducing labor cost
- Experience – improves the employee and customer experience
- Platform – drives innovation, differentiate you from the competition
Employees and customers are first, and hotels need to focus on a consistent effort to meet new demands and requirements.
Digital Transformation Framework Partnership for Hotels
Hotels today have to invest in people and technology in a context that adds value to everyone involved.
Don’t continue to neglect or take the people's transformation for granted. Technology is a digital tool that will help your hotel when implemented in collaboration with your employees.
Partner with your employees and they will help with retaining and hiring people.
I also invite you to work with me as your hotel partner to help implement a new innovative digital transformation framework that opens the digital gateways to more direct bookings without competing with the OTA.
Shoot me an email at: [email protected]
Are Morch is a digital transformation coach helping hotels open their digital front door, reimagine their processes and culture, and transform experiences in a fast-paced world!
Are Morch
Digital Transformation Coach
Are Morch, Digital Transformation Coach
