With so much noise in the marketplace, you may not know where to begin or what to look for when you start evaluating solutions. You can’t afford to invest in a solution that may lead you down the path of technological oblivion. Sure it works great today, but it may not be built for tomorrow. As your business needs change, what if the inability to adapt to those changes causes your operations to grind to a halt?
Well, the times are indeed changing, and the advent of cloud-based software will help reduce fears of adopting new technologies. Some of the biggest headaches regarding software implementation have had to do with product scalability. Any number of hotel software solutions will meet your hotel’s feature functionality requirements, but this is only part of the software solution landscape. As hotels grow, acquire other hotels, add guest activities, deal with onward distribution, and position themselves for the onslaught of mobile solutions, it’s paramount that your software provider fully understands the future architecture and technological requirements within the industry to meet the evolving landscape.
As I mentioned earlier, you should also take the financial stability of the company offering cloud-based solutions into account in your selection. The deployment of these solutions should reduce the costs for any hotel climbing on board, but keep in mind there are substantial ramp-up costs for the vendor to put these cloud-based solutions into place, including hardware, infrastructure, redundancy, and support. Make sure that the company you choose is financially stable so both you and the vendor are successful. Isn’t this what it’s all about?
There will always be flashy presentations and over-promising in order to win your business. But if you’re thorough in your investigation, you should be confident that you made the right choice. Of course, it’s also up to the hotel technology industry as a whole to be transparent about what they currently offer and what they’ll deliver in the future.
Better products and less PowerPoint presentations will make for better business.
Alan E. Young is the VP of Global Marketing for Infor Softbrands. Infor Softbrands is the world’s largest software company committed to developing and delivering the best hotel property management systems, central reservation systems and financial managements systems for the global hotel industry.
