The tech world moves rapidly, and there’s nothing more off-putting to customers than seeing an outdated app or interface. But when your business grows and scales, it’s easy to be left behind as you deal with the new complexities of a growing business.
You see this happen sometimes with large hotel chains that have a massive infrastructure to manage. Their sheer size prevents them from updating quickly. But smaller hospitality businesses with room to grow have the advantage of being able to use technology to help them scale.
The Importance of Scaling in Hospitality
Scaling is important in every industry but is especially important for hospitality. As hospitality businesses grow, the challenges they face change and grow in size. For example, managing a small group of housekeeping staff for a single hotel is very different from managing several groups for 10 hotels.
A few key areas stand out when it comes to scaling:
Information management
Communications
Maintenance
Payment options
In each of these important aspects of hospitality businesses, scaling up comes with new challenges. But fortunately, new technology can help manage the issues for each one.
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Cloud Solutions
Using the cloud is an ideal way to manage information, and hospitality businesses have a lot of information to manage. Reservations, room numbers, contact information, and more need to be carefully tracked for each guest.
Large operations mean more data, and also more locations. Cloud-based solutions help businesses manage all of their data remotely, so that they can access information for all their customers at any time and from any place. That’s why 33% of hotel operators believe their entire operations will be on the cloud in the next few years.
Cloud-based solutions usually come with built-in scaling capability. Providers like Amazon AWS or Microsoft Azure already have millions of computers ready for use, so you can tap into their capabilities whenever you need to expand. If you tried to do this on your own, you would have to buy and implement new infrastructure every time your operation grew.
Omnichannel Communication
Fifty years ago, people communicated in just a few ways: in person, on the phone, by mail, fax, or perhaps by telegram. But in the 2020’s, customers can and do use a much wider variety of communications options, including:
Smartphone Apps
Social Media
Email/SMS/Phone
Online Web Portals
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The larger your business, and the more customers you have, the more communications channels you will have to maintain. Otherwise, you may miss out on business from one group of people or another.
People respond to different channels differently. An estimated 82% of text messages are read within five minutes, but 75% of emails go unread completely.
Omnichannel communications technologies, like RingCentral, put all of these options in one place. At the touch of a button, you can send and receive information from every communication channel your customers use.
Smart IoT Technology
The Internet of Things has countless uses. When it comes to the hospitality industry, one of its most valuable uses is with helping maintain your physical infrastructure. Smart room technology can tell when a guest is out to save electricity. It can also predict when appliances will need maintenance, or something needs fixing. A leaky faucet, for example, can cost up to $720 a year.
These advantages help cut down on the activity needed from maintenance staff, freeing them up to do other tasks. This becomes more and more important as hospitality businesses grow in size.
Also, smart guest experiences take note of guest behavior and adapt to their needs and preferences. Based on past behavior, they can decide if, for example, a guest likes to order room service at a certain time of day. This sort of technology lets hospitality businesses provide the personalization of small hotels even at big-business levels.
Payment Options
Just like with communication channels, payment options are proliferating wildly. Guests may choose to pay with everything from cash, to cards, to payment apps like Apple Pay. Some may even desire to pay in cryptocurrency.
Future of Payment
Digital and mobile wallets are now the dominant form of payment online and are only projected to increase in significance. An estimated 51.7% of payments will be made with digital wallets in 2024, but many customers will continue to use credit and debit cards.
When your operations expand, it will help to provide customers with as many payment options as possible. Managing multiple applications can be a pain, so like with your communication channels, consolidating all payment options into one platform can streamline the process.
Scaling with JetRockets
When your business grows, you need a push forward. The alternative is to get mired in the growing complexities caused by scaling your business.
For many problems, there are generic, off-the-shelf software solutions that can help you. But they will never be a perfect fit for your business’s unique challenges and needs.
The alternative is to hire a software development team to build a solution for you. This path offers several advantages:
Tailored features for your exact situation.
Ongoing updates to match your business’s growth and trajectory.
A team of experts who can support the tech side of your development.
At JetRockets, we push businesses forward by aligning our goals with yours. We make sure that your every need is factored into the development process, so you will have an application that helps your business scale with ease. If you run a restaurant, hotel, or travel agency, then give us a call. We can help your business scale to new heights.
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