5 Technologies Hotels Should Adopt in 2024
Embracing modern tech can drive revenue, hyper-personalize the guest experience, and scale business for hotels in the coming year.
In 2024, hotel owners and operators should leverage modern and flexible technology to expand revenue opportunities, personalize guest experiences, and scale their businesses. In this article, we explore the key technologies that hotels should adopt to elevate services and enhance their performance in the coming year.
1. Modern Cloud PMS with Attribute-Based Selling: Unlocking Guest Personalization & Expanding Revenue
Modern PMS platforms with Attribute-Based Selling (ABS) capabilities are poised to revolutionize how hotels customize their offerings. Guests can dynamically tailor their stay by choosing attributes such as bed types, amenities, or time components like early check-in or late check-out. ABS extends this flexibility further, allowing guests to purchase rooms with specific features—like a balcony, city view, or elevator proximity—at a pre-calculated attractive price automatically. A study by Stayntouch and NYU Tisch Center of Hospitality revealed that over 60% of U.S. travelers valued customizing their stay through attribute or feature-based shopping, with 78% expressing interest in tailored features. This hyper-personalization can significantly enhance customer satisfaction and boost revenue through expanded upselling opportunities. Moreover, the study found that 63% of respondents spending over $251 per night for premium hotel rooms and 48% spending $151-$250 per night were willing to pay more for customizing their stay with attribute-based shopping.
2. Mobile and Self-Service Technologies: Redefining Guest Interactions
Mobile and self-service technologies provide a welcome solution to an industry facing persistent labor shortages and high turnover. Mobile and kiosk-based self-check-in enables guests to efficiently check into their rooms in under a minute, alleviating pressure on often overworked front-desk staff. Hotels can seamlessly extend this mobile-first experience throughout the guest’s stay by integrating a modern PMS with AI powered mobile guest messaging to deliver instant responses to questions and requests. Additionally, a mobile Point-of-Sale (POS) system enhances the guest experience by offering a personalized and convenient dining experience. Similar to ABS, mobile and self-serve technologies serve as an ideal platform to increase ancillary revenue by automatically delivering targeted upgrade and amenity offers directly to the smartphone in a guest’s hands.
3. Digital Payments: A Secure and Convenient Transaction Experience
Adopting a unified commerce payment service simplifies payment processing for both hotels and guests. A unified system consolidates payment facilitation stages under a single provider, easing chargeback resolution, ensuring compliance with data protection regulations, and safeguarding guests from cyber attacks. Unified payment systems, using tokenization and digital mobility, enhance hotel revenue by reducing payment friction and providing real-time data for valuable customer insights.
4. Internet of Things (IoT): Scaling With Elevated Service, Efficiency, and Sustainability
The Internet of Things (IoT) is poised to significantly enhance the guest experience, resulting in heightened customer satisfaction, increased loyalty, and ultimately more repeat bookings. IoT-enabled devices, ranging from smart-room controls to personalized service automation, facilitate an immersive stay that guests can instantly customize through their smartphones. Furthermore, IoT provides a wealth of guest preference data that hotels can leverage to offer increasingly tailored services, fostering guest loyalty and boosting the chances of repeat bookings. By capitalizing on the interconnected capabilities of IoT, hotels position themselves to scale their business by providing memorable and consistently delightful guest experiences. Additionally, leveraging in-room technology for temperature and electricity control can significantly reduce the costs and amount of energy consumption for hotels, greatly enabling them to be more sustainable and cost-efficient.
5. Advanced Revenue Management: Data-Driven Decision Making
In the evolving hospitality landscape, data-driven decision-making is crucial for hotels to maximize revenue. Advanced Revenue Management systems in 2024 leverage machine learning algorithms to analyze market trends, competitor pricing, and guest behavior. This technology empowers hotels to dynamically adjust room rates, optimize inventory, and implement targeted promotions in real time. By harnessing the power of data analytics, hotels can tailor pricing strategies to demand fluctuations, ultimately maximizing revenue and profitability. By implementing advanced revenue management tools, hotels can adapt to market changes more quickly, ensuring competitiveness in the dynamic hospitality landscape.
About Stayntouch
Stayntouch delivers a cloud-native and guest-centric hotel property management system (PMS) with a comprehensive library of over 1,100 integrations. Stayntouch's cloud-native PMS empowers independent hotels, hotel groups, and management companies to drive revenue, reduce costs, enhance service, and captivate their guests. In 2022, Stayntouch launched Stayntouch 2.0, a fully integrated technology suite featuring its core cloud-native PMS and guest kiosk solution, a comprehensive chain management module, a seamless booking engine (Stayntouch Booking), a robust payment processing platform (Stayntouch Pay), and a powerful channel manager. Stayntouch 2.0 enables hotels to streamline their operations, maximize and diversify their revenue streams, and deliver an even more enhanced guest experience with the innovation and support of one trusted technology partner. Stayntouch is supported by a team of professionals with deep roots in the hospitality industry and is a trusted partner to industry-leading management companies including Sage Hospitality, HEI Hotels & Resorts, and EOS Hospitality, innovative independent brands such as Village Hotels, Pod Hotels, and First Hotels, and iconic flagship properties such as the TWA Hotel, Showboat Hotel Atlantic City, and Zoku Amsterdam. For more information, visit www.stayntouch.com.
