Role of Ict in the Hospitality Industry

The airline industry has long attempted to segment the air travel market in order to effectively target its constituents. The classic airline model consists of First Class, Business Class and Economy, and the demographics that make up the classes have both similarities and differences to the other classes. For instance there may be similarities between business class travellers on a particular flight, but they will not all be travelling for the same reason. An almost-universal characteristic of air travel is that customers do not fly for the sake of flying; the destination is the important element and the travel is a by-product, a means-to-an-end that involves the necessity of an aircraft that gets the customer from point A to point B.

There are a number of support functions used by large hospitality businesses with the aim to support and improve the overall efficiency of a business. The four support functions I will be looking at are finance, customer services, marketing and human resources.

This new reservation system opened many doors in the industry. Most of the travel Agencies started using the system as well as the advantages of discount fares that they could find in this system.

The new reservation and booking system is a horizontal application because a large number of people use it in several markets such as the food, airline, camping, and hotel industries, whereas small organization is more appropriate for a vertical application that have specific business processes

Also by these systems the company reduced its business cost and maintains the information and the data very updated form.

How ? ü  Built systems for external use by travel agents to search and book flights for customers ü  Established direct-to-consumer sales portals via the Internet. ü  The adoption of e-tickets Airlines' direct Web sites provided a number of services : —  The ability to purchase flights, which made them attractive destinations for travelers performing their own Web searches. —  These Web sites housed full flight schedules for the airline, real-time information on flight arrival/departure times, fleet information, and customer loyalty programs.

Managers who doubt this financial IT investment should ask themselves if they can afford loosing a customer on the grounds of not satisfying his needs. Since the rare resource of a company is its capabilities that create value with the technology, while actively implementing the CRM technology, on top of all the current capabilities and expertise already employed by Wyndham, it would be beneficial to add additional supporting business processes such as Newsletters, that can be published weekly or monthly, making sure not to bore the reader with regular issues of nonsense, but highlight the special program services and the company’s new moves in the field, Regular follow up calls to identify with the customers and find out how they are doing and regular market/satisfaction surveys that can be sent by e-mail, post online and most important, reviewed regularly by the company. An online guest feedback system can be implemented to help track customer service levels. Believing that taking care of the hotel’s employees will result in them taking care of the guests, a natural extension would be to implement an online employee opinion system as well, where employees can complete an online survey to measure their satisfaction and provide an immediate feedback. A key driver of guest satisfaction is how well employees handle issues that arise during a guest`s stay. It

Hilton Hotels, one of the biggest worldwide corporations in the hospitality industry, adopted a Customer Really Matter (CRM) strategy to manage its diverse segments of hotels and to improve customer experience. The cornerstone of the CRM, the custom-built OnQ information system, built profiles of the guests, which could be used by the front desk employees and the reservations center to better serve the customers. The OnQ system did improved efficiency of call center operations, but the way of using it also reduced the flexibility of the customer service in the hotels. It could benefit or harm the service-profit chain depending on the specific situation. A few recommendations were made at the end of the case study to improve the system. In general, Hilton should implement big data analytics and give more control to the customers.

The buyers of the services of travel agencies are consumers, that is, individuals and businesses. For this industry we are dealing with a small degree of concentration, due to the wide range of services.

Within the category of services, it applies to different types of customers such as family, solo travellers and business travellers, the key focus of this report is on the upper-class service for business travellers and how it influences business travellers to purchase a flight package from them instead of using their competitors Jet airways, British Airways or Emirates. We can discover the decision-making process and how it operates but it’s important to understand the marketing strategy behind the company that makes it very successful and attracts more business travellers to fly with them.

The most important thing to having a successful business is to have the most up to date information. If you have all the information at your fingertips it can help you to make the best possible decisions. What kind of information is available and how do we sort through it and use this information? In the hospitality industry the amount of information received everyday is overwhelming, and it isn’t possible for staff to be able to sort through it and organize it properly. In the hospitality industry the information technologies are the tools that the staff uses to sort and manage the information and the balanced score card is just one

Over the past years, customers have been heavily relying on airline reservation systems to book their tickets, reserve seats, pay for the tickets and also check-in online. For customers, this has been a very convenient method and they are able to easily plan their trips. For the Airline companies, these systems have the whole flight inventory managed. They have all the flight information stored and records are maintained. It also provides a platform for communication between other airline companies for their “code-sharing plans” and

Fast, user-friendly online reservation system by facilitating e-ticketing and reducing staffing requirements at telephone reservation centers and airport counters. (Kuzmicki, 2009)

1 The tourism school, Zhejiang Gongshang University, Hangzhou, China; 2School of Business Administration, Zhejiang Gongshang University, Hangzhou, China. Email: chenjue8@yahoo.com

A point of sales system is another great addition to nay growing business. The POS has many functions. The POS will contain a register for purchases, have the ability to track reports and menu maintenance, improve service speed, and enhance customer service. To increase service speed, the POS efficiently makes order entries that are then transferred to the kitchen. This results in fewer mistakes and the ability to track ticket and wait times. The system also has the function of splitting checks and makes card processing simple. This ensures more seat turnover and shorter wait times for the customers. In return this has the potential to increase revenue at every service. POS can create loyalty programs that ensure repeat customers and generate more sales of gift cards. POS provides operational control that analyzes “detailed reports to drill down on sales, server and restaurant performance” (NCR 2013). A software like ALOHA also provides a training interface that allows new employees to learn the system quickly. This reduces the cost a restaurant would ultimately have to pay on training new employees. The ALOHA system is very up to date with new technology trends, providing mobile and digital signage and cloud based solutions and social technologies. The variety of functions in a point of sales system makes it very attractive to new restaurant owners. The cost of a POS can range hundreds to thousands of dollars based on the size of the