A definitive shift from legacy hospitality technologies — which rely on the replication of like-type data across numerous primary business systems — to a better, proven approach is still an aspiration rather than a reality for the hotel industry. The benefits of such a shift are many, but our industry has not made the meaningful progress already enjoyed by other industries.
As early as 2004, blueprints were formally drawn up for what might be considered an ideal composition of technology systems [services] for the hotel industry. At its core, the new approach employs a service-oriented architecture [SOA], which consolidates not only the business data that has historically been replicated across multiple separate systems but also common replicated services.
Let’s break this down. First, we need to understand why the legacy composition of separate hotel systems and databases came to be.
Back in the 1980s, when hotel property management systems began automating on-property operations — front office, cashier, housekeeping, guest history, reservations, etc. — the data storage and processing power of the underlying systems had limits. This led to separate, targeted system solutions [sold by separate vendors] aligned to logical collections of business functions — systems for property management, sales and catering, point of sale, central reservations, revenue management and accounting, to name the primaries.
To combine these systems together in support of the full guest journey from booking, arriving, dining, staying and departing, interfaces were designed and developed by each of these vendors to exchange business data between the systems. Regrettably, interface standards were not prevalent back then and the library of proprietary point-to-point interface specifications ran into the many hundreds, which further exacerbated the inefficiencies and costs of deploying and maintaining these separate systems. Remarkably, this fragmented best-of-breed approach to system deployment has remained relatively unchanged for decades despite significant technology and communications advances that negate the original scaling and performance problems.
Next, we need to understand how a service-oriented architecture solution would better suit the hotel industry’s needs. To help in this, let’s cite some current legacy systems scenarios.
At hotel brand A, a guest books through the hotel brand’s website, as powered by the central reservation system, which relies on inventory data and pricing data fed to it by the property management system — two synchronized copies of the inventory and pricing, data replication — and the guest pays the required booking pre-payment by credit card, which employs the central reservation system's payment processing service. A copy of the booking is sent from the central reservation system to the property management system to await the guest’s arrival — two synchronized copies of the same booking, data replication. This guest is a member of the brand’s loyalty program, and when booking on the website signed into their membership record, as stored and maintained in the central reservation system to facilitate not having to enter all their personal information and preferences each time they book. To capture the guest’s stay and spending information, the property management system needs a copy of their loyalty profile, too — two synchronized copies of the same profile, data replication.
This is just highlighting the overhead of data replication and storage, but consider that when the guest checks out and settles the bill, it is the property management system's payment processing service that is utilized. Further, let’s add that the guest during their stay dines in the restaurant but elects to pay for the meal by credit card rather than charging the meal to their room account. Three payment processing services are involved — the central reservation, property management and point of sale systems. Just to cap this example off, each of the three mentioned systems all require data administration to maintain all the reference data needed in support of their respective functions. This data administration may well be performed by the same hotel employee who needs to have a user profile in each system and must sign-in [authenticate]separately to each system, which is an illustration of both redundant data replication and service replication.
Now let’s consider the following: In a service-oriented architecture solution there is one booking database, one inventory and pricing database, one guest profile database, one user profile database. There is also one shared booking service, one shared payment service, one shared profile service, and one shared user authentication service. The efficiencies and benefits of not having to synchronize and replicate data between separate systems and not having to operate multiple services that do the very same thing are somewhat obvious.
Why, therefore, has this approach not been deployed before now, and extensively?
The understandable answer perhaps lies not the design and creation of such a consolidated offering, as the viable blueprint has been available for nearly 20 years, but rather the ability of the hotel company to transition from its current legacy systems. You simply can’t do a big-bang migration of such a magnitude. Even if a hotel company was prepared to endure the operational disruption of a wholesale change to its technologies, there may be years left on one or more legacy system licenses.
In recent years, several large technology vendors to the hospitality industry have made noteworthy strides toward getting this service-oriented architecture solution to market. They appreciate that it is long overdue, the appropriate technologies and communications now exist at scale, and it is a clearly obvious need. However, they are also very conscious of the transition challenges, with the savvier among them investing heavily in the temporarily backward capability of a new solution, so that the hotel company can migrate to the end goal at its own controlled pace.
Interfaced best-of-breed, standalone systems absolutely served the industry well by fostering and propagating the computerization of most manual hotel operational and hotel distribution functions, but the time for us to make this transition, in earnest, is long overdue.
Mark Haley and Mark Hoare are partners with Prism Hospitality Consulting, a boutique consulting firm servicing the global hospitality industry in technology, distribution, and marketing strategies. For more information, visit: www.PrismHospitalityConsulting.com.
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