NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Hotel industry-wide adoption of technology that supports automation on properties is inevitable, said Highgate Ventures Principal Kurien Jacob, but he believes the COVID-19 pandemic has significantly "accelerated the digital transformation of hotels throughout the world."
Speaking with Hotel News Now during the 2021 Hotel Data Conference, Jacob said hotels have had to embrace automation-enabling technology "from the point of selling their rooms — distribution, pricing, revenue management — all the way up to contactless check-in."
"Hotels have also had to do more with less, so staffing at hotels has become a big issue," he said. "Hotels have figured out how to use technology ... to help drive certain results with much less staff."
He said businesses overall have been forced to transform swiftly over the past 18 months.
"Hotels, which were traditionally slower to embrace technology, have had to embrace it much faster," he said. "And hotels that have done well will see the results coming out of the pandemic, too."
Jacob believes the pandemic has also made sorting through and finding relevant data more complicated for the hotel industry. He said simply comparing data points to what they were prior to the pandemic doesn't yield insights into more recent trends.
"There's a lot of volatility that's happening in terms of what's going on with COVID, what's happening with the rules and regulations — all of those are impacting travel," he said. "People have to be on the ball looking at data in a much faster manner."
He said technology will be key for hoteliers looking to avoid information overload.
"The other problem is there's huge, humongous amounts of data. The key is: how do you distill through this entire data explosion that's there and pick up the right information trends ... to help you make those decisions better? There are a lot of tools and technology available to help bring that to the fore. And in some cases, it's important for machines and artificial intelligence to help hotels distill through that data."
For more from HNN's conversation with Highgate Ventures' Kurien Jacob, watch the video above.