TECHNOLOGY
WARP
Getty ImagesSPEED
WITH HARD- EARNED HINDSIGHT , HOTELS KEEP GUEST- FACING TECH DEVELOPMENT ON A FAST TRACK .
By BARBARA BOHN , MANAGING EDITOR
One theme emerges from conversations with hotel industry executives as they discuss their technology plans for 2021 : Move fast . If 2020 had any lessons , it was that when circumstances change , you must adapt quickly or pay the price . Here ’ s what leaders from Red Planet , IHG and Wyndham Hotels & Resorts are saying about their tech plans this year .
TIM HANSING , CEO , RED PLANET HOTELS As the pandemic deepened across Asia , Bangkokbased Red Planet went into survival mode : “ We retooled our IT system to create this very tight cost control ,” CEO Tim Hansing says . Purchase orders jump through a series of approval hoops . “ I approve every single expense . We managed to shut down and control expenses really fast , which was a really good thing , but we ’ re still going through that .”
Red Planet laid off about 150 of its 550 employees and closed many of its 32 hotels ( all have since reopened ). Already lean staffing at the budget hotels means heavier reliance on automation ; each hotel , average size 167 rooms , is run with about nine staff , down from 12 . “ We were partway through introducing the automated check-in system that we then pushed forward and reduced the numbers of staff in the hotels , we think permanently ,” Hansing says . “ We had a good IT system in place , initially , and we just built on it . Moving forward , it ’ s all about more automation .”
In 2021 , the focus shifts even more to the customer . “ I think the only difference now that I ’ m looking at is how we connect with our customer and the sales and marketing function , because the digitization of the world has accelerated ,” he says . “ That does have implications , not only to back of house and check-in
32 hotelsmag . com January / February 2021