We live, work, and play dramatically different than we did just a few years ago. Our new lifestyle has a catchy new name, So Lo Mo coined by industry experts. Social, Local, Mobile – the new life – is vastly different and that means your typical hotel guest now has vastly different needs and expects your hotel to meet them.
Smart hoteliers are working to meet this challenge and enhance the guest experience by moving to fast-speed Internet, providing more bandwidth for guests’ smart devices, and moving to smarter technologies that increase guest loyalty.
Today’s customers, be it business travellers or holiday tourists, communicate more and more through smartphones, tablets, laptops, videoconferences, webinars, and VoIP phone calls. This shift means the average traveller requires more and more technology friendly hotels where every aspect of staying means instant service right from booking through check out.
Providing the right environment for technology will therefore prove critical to how your hotel’s service captures visitors and turns them into loyal guests. This means expanding the way we look at cloud from being a strong back-end support for a hotel’s integrated processes, to also a front-end player that ultimately improves overall guest experience.
Cloud-based systems excellently manage your data security, storage, and bandwidth, while you, the hotel is free to focus on your guests’ actual needs, and ultimately conduct your business more efficiently. A study from Forrester.com indicates that the cloud economy this year is headed to 62% IT leaders moving some or nearly all of their IT operations on the cloud; while 21% IT leaders have said, “We’ll limit our cloud activity to SaaS.”
There’s no doubt, the So Lo Mo guest of tomorrow will prefer to stay in a hotel that runs on the cloud than one that is still contemplating which way the cloud tide will flow.
Suggested reading: http://thehospitalityblog.ecornell.com/solomo/