TECHNOLOGY : MOBILE
Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group ’ s iPad app
some adoption , but I ’ m not sure it has integrated itself in people ’ s lives to the extent that it will in two or three years .”
Power of suggestion One emerging opportunity builds upon something hoteliers are very familiar with : getting to know your customer ’ s likes and needs . One example being examined by the hotel industry is the Amazon . com retail model , as one of that company ’ s defining traits is how astutely it analyzes what users buy and where users browse and then makes effective promotional offers tailored to each user .
“ The next step in mobile is the semantic relationships of searches by figuring out what ’ s important and what ’ s related for what somebody ’ s looking at ,” says Robert Cole , hotel technology consultant and founder of RockCheetah , Menomonee Falls , Wisconsin . “ You wind up getting this mobile technology of being able to engage with somebody about anything , anytime , anywhere — and you can take that across multiple devices .”
Some vendors are already offering this service to hotels , and hotel companies regardless of size or segment say this type of functionality is becoming increasingly attractive . “ It ’ s definitely a big area where we ’ ll see growth . We ’ re looking at a recommendation engine as we speak ,” says Christoph Oberli , vice president of e-commerce and interactive , Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group .
The biggest challenge to implementing the Amazon model at the moment is integrating hotel CRM data within such a recommendation engine . For many hotel companies , that is where the conversation stops .
Indeed , the more global a collection of hotels , the more difficult the integration . “ We only have 29 hotels , but we ’ re completely global ,” Oberli says . “ In different areas of the world we may have different systems in place that do exactly the same thing , so you ’ d have to integrate into even more systems .”
Overcoming such obstacles will likely fall on the shoulders of the larger brands that have the necessary resources and data from their loyalty programs to do so . Jennifer Deslauriers-Knop , senior director , online strategy and optimization , for
54 HOTELS April 2013 www . hotelsmag . com