31 Mar How Hospitality Providers Can Benefit from the Cloud
When Covid restrictions started, no industry took it harder than the hospitality industry. Now, as falling case numbers signal a return to normalcy for many sectors, hotels are still struggling with reduced work and leisure travel while grappling with increased labor costs and supply shortages.
Those who are traveling have new expectations for the guest experience, which is adding to overall industry pressure.
Could taking advantage of a cloud hosting solution help reduce costs, increase productivity, address staffing issues, and improve the guest experience?
What Are the Advantages of the Cloud for Hotels?
Cloud hosting has been a buzzword in data heavy industries for years but in some ways the hospitality industry has been slower to jump on board. But just as adopting databases allowed hotels to expand reservation functionality in the 1990’s, the cloud offers today’s hoteliers a solution that can improve the guest experience while reducing costs associated with in-house data storage and server maintenance.
You can tap into a reliable, third-party data center to power your day-to-day operations:
• Automation of building maintenance processes and infrastructure support like room access and rekeying
• Flexibility for staff and guests to access information from anywhere to provide a seamless experience with in-demand self-service options
• Redirection of hardware costs and shifting security concerns to a vendor partner — and only paying for the storage you need rather than having to hedge against increased data demands with onsite server closets
• Highlighting guest experiences by having access to personalized information and the ability to provide remote check-in and check-out services that reduce staffing demands while increasing guest satisfaction
• Standardize operations to provide an efficient, repeatable process for all franchisees and locations
• Diversify to ensure disruption and disaster proof operations at scale.
When staff can tap into your back office and guest services systems from anywhere you can avoid the tech glitches and disruptions that can linger in the mind of today’s travelers.
Can You Adequately Maintain Security and Onsite Servers?
Sending data to “who knows where” can seem a little scary, but the reality is that modern cloud vendors operate highly secure data centers where your critical guest information and payment data is guarded through encryption and other compliance measures that exceed current hospitality industry standards.
And because these data centers can meet huge processing demands, you’ll have no idea that your data isn’t down the hall. When guest service functions happen in half the time, guest satisfaction rates rise.
If you continue to store sensitive financial and personal guest information on site, you need a dedicated team so the necessary maintenance and monitoring of the hardware and software is conducted. If technology isn’t your primary focus, it’s easy to create a situation where updates go undone, security lapses, and hardware breaks down. And this puts your operations at risk.
If your onsite system goes down, you probably don’t have an alternate option to get you back and running with only a minimal disruption. You’re at the mercy of either in-house IT staff to work in an emergency or contract labor that may not support you adequately in a crisis or local disaster.
Because disasters do happen. Disaster recovery means being able to quickly rewind to a pre-determined point in time to restore lost data. It also means being able to transfer your hotel or organization’s primary operations using built-in redundancies and protocols at multiple data centers. Offsite cloud storage can be the foundation of your organization’s disaster plan.
A reliable cloud partner will typically be able to promise reliability rates in the 90% range from their data centers. At CyberlinkASP, our service level agreement (SLA) guarantees a 99.99% uptime from our network and associated data centers.
With the right cloud partner, you’ll have built in security with round the clock reliability for on property processes and procedures.
How Can Cloud Services Improve Guest Experiences?
Shifting to the cloud gives hospitality brands the opportunity to exceed guest expectations in a competitive industry. With the right partner, you can leverage the power of cloud hosting to your advantage while reducing operational costs.
Next week, we’ll discuss some specific use cases for cloud hosting services and how these services can directly benefit small, midsize, private, and corporate franchise hoteliers and their guests.