To invest in the right types of technology and respond to the needs of properties, John Laplante, chief information officer at G6 Hospitality, said hoteliers must understand what the recovery will look like, where guests will be traveling and what they will be doing on-property.

"Today, if you think about revenue strategy, if you don't have the right platform, you will struggle to be able to price into the recovery, and you look back and identify you've missed opportunities because you may have battled the market versus leading the market in a pricing strategy," he said. "Having robust tools that have those types of capabilities are critical."

Investing in technology that appeals to the needs of guests is important, and it starts with figuring out where guests might want to travel to, Laplante said.

G6 currently is working with a cloud service provider to tweak its algorithm to better predict where guests want to stay based on prior stays, which would give guests a better experience through not only its website but its whole distribution network.

Laplante said the company was able to pull data from its property management system, its central reservations system and its web analytics platform to create an algorithm that states a guest will have a high probability of booking a property in certain cities or states.

This work isn't finished yet and G6 Hospitality is still tweaking some things, he said, but "the initial findings have been very positive."

The company recently moved its web environment to the cloud service provider it's using, which was the last piece in moving all of G6 Hospitality's distribution systems to the cloud.

This move has enabled the company to leverage new technology, he said.

G6 Hospitality has partnered with its content delivery network provider to identify and categorize all traffic that goes through that environment, Laplante said.

This enables the company to find patterns and ensure the right types of traffic are moving through the web environment and that the wrong types — such as bot traffic — are not.

"When you look at this recovery cycle, whatever technology can do to help reduce cost and scale with cost is critical," he said. "Looking at managing your cloud costs is another area that a lot of companies should be looking at."

Those not using the cloud are stuck with the having to pay for the number of central processing units they have, he said.

"That really does put a large burden on the enterprise," he added.

As the COVID-19 pandemic stretches on, travelers want to know the hotel they are staying at is clean and safe, and technology can help with that, Laplante said.

G6 Hospitality follows a program to ensure all properties are adhering to cleaning protocols — something guests expect — but reducing touch points is another way to help guests feel safe.

One way hoteliers can reduce touch points is by adopting contactless payment systems.

"I can just come up and tap my card or tap my phone on the credit card reader versus having to insert my card or touch a terminal," he said.