Business First September 2017 Business First September 2017 | Page 30
IN CONVERSATION
IN CONVERSATION WITH: HASTINGS HOTELS
Blending technology and hospitality
for success
Hand in hand with the recently completed £10m renovation on its six hotels, Hastings Hotels have placed greater emphasis than ever
before on new technologies to meet growing customer expectations. With the much-anticipated arrival of Northern Ireland’s largest
hotel, the Grand Central, we catch up with Pamela Shaw, Group Revenue Manager, to see what they’ve been up and the role
technology plays.
cloud, from the customer database to our
office apps and email.
Having our customer database in the cloud
ensures that we 'know' our customers across
our hotel estate: if a regular customer from
one of our hotels stays at another of our
hotels, the front of house can see that
information and use it to build that
relationship.
Secondly, a Managed Network. With all our
hotels now connected to just one server over
a secure managed network we have been able
to consolidate and streamline much of our
overheads. For instance, where once we had
to have three air conditioning units operating
constantly in the comms room, we now have
just one.
Rather than having SIX disparate telephony
systems, we now have a centralised IP
telephony and contact centre solution. All
this has dramatically reduced hardware and
the associated operational costs.
Q: The human element is possibly
more important in the hospitality
industry than in any other. Is digital
technology transforming this?
Digital technology is absolutely
transforming our business but we need to
strike a balance when it comes to the guest
experience. The human element is crucial.
Today there are unmanned hotels, or self
service hotels, where the only people are the
guests who are serviced by robots or kiosks.
At Hastings Hotels, I can’t see us becoming
totally humanfree anytime soon.
Yet our customers have become more tech
savvy, more tech demanding, which means
we have to embrace technology to keep up.
Be it a leisure traveller, a business traveller or
a conference organiser, secure networks and
superfast WiFi are all becoming musthaves.
Q: How has technology most
benefitted the hotel guest experience
so far?
Quite simply, customers want a more
responsive service, they want convenience –
for instance, they want lightningfast booking
confirmation.
And they want to be able to make that
booking via a channel that suits them, which
is increasingly mobile. We've had to respond
to that and make our booking engine mobile
friendly, and that's not just that it looks good
on a mobile screen, but that it's more
streamlined and the process can be
completed in one or two clicks.
Customers also want a personalised service
and we’ve been able to improve on that by
sharing of data across all our locations so that
we are better informed about our guests’ past
visits and preferences.
Q: The hotel industry has access to an
incredibly rich pool of customer data.
What are the biggest challenges and
opportunities in this area?
The biggest challenge is protecting that
data and ensuring you are using it correctly,
particularly as we look to GDPR. When it
comes to opportunities, targeted marketing
and building customer relationships are the
two key areas for us.
We can create highly targeted packages for
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specific groups of customers. We can deliver
geospecific email marketing campaigns for
our leisure centres for example. For us, the
data allows us to be smarter and more in tune
with our guests across our hotels.
Q: Technology is about adding real
value. Where has it had most notable
impact on your business?
While this might not sound exciting we're
making real savings by linking key kitchen
equipment and utilities like heating and
electricity to a central portal where we can
monitor and manage usage and costs.
We can also use that portal to switch off
particular machines or heating systems
remotely. It’s IoT in practice.
For a hotel group like Hastings, having that
realtime overview of heating and electricity
usage is invaluable. It has helped us to
streamline our costs and give us control.
The advanced networking technology has
been critical to guarantee this information is
uptotheminute and alwayson.
Q: Which technology investment is the
Hastings Group making the most of
this year?
Firstly, Cloud. Over the years we've
migrated many of our critical apps to the
Q. And looking to the future, what
does technology success look like?
I am pleased to say we have now created
the technology capability that will help us
continue on our path of success.
We have embarked on a cloud and digital
transformation that is working, embracing
smart data and smart infrastructure.
It will support business expansion and
provides a solid foundation our seventh hotel,
Grand Central.
Success for me would be that we continue
to use and build on that platform, improving
the guest experience and operational
efficiency as we grow.
If you’d like to be in conversation with eir
Business NI, give the team a call at
028 9000 2100 or drop us an email to
[email protected]