8 Trends Driving IT Decision-Making in Hotel and Lodging

To provide a strong guest experience and support the essential goals of the business, it is increasingly important for brands and hotel properties to build an effective, comprehensive IT strategy.  Tactical investment in and successful delivery of IT solutions enables critical organizational assets and initiatives, helps strengthen a brand’s reputation, and most importantly meets the demands of today’s connected user – bolstering those highly-touted guest satisfaction scores.

This all sounds convincing from a macro level, but when we dig deeper into the specific trends driving IT decision-making and hear from the industry experts responsible for making these decisions, a clearer picture emerges of IT in today’s hotel and lodging landscape.  Hospitality Technology’s annual Lodging Technology Study does just that; tracking budgets, business objectives and investment allocation trends in hotel IT.

In this infographic, we highlight 8 of the more revealing metrics from the study, which help encapsulate the current state and direction of IT trends in hoteling. 

There is a plethora of notable trends from the study, so let’s review. 

The first data point demonstrates where IT investments are prioritized from a budgetary perspective moving forward.  It shouldn’t come as a surprise that 57% of hotel properties will spend more on IT in the next year, and with only 2% spending less on IT investments, it underscores the importance of IT’s impact on the lodging space.

The graphic then drills down into how IT investments are being allocated along with their associated business goals.   It is acknowledged that guests anticipate a high-quality network experience during their stay, and confirmed with “Network connectivity” and “Hardware” investments amounting for nearly half of (45%) IT budgets, clearly identify the importance of this service for their properties and brands.  With that said, nearly 37% cited ‘Maintaining IT Infrastructure’ as a significant friction point for their business, with 39% citing a “Lack of Sufficient IT Budget” as their top friction point.  These trends may signify there’s a greater opportunity for Hospitality MSPs to alleviate the burden of network maintenance and management through their managed service offerings; it may also indicate a need for more efficient network management tools to simplify day to day network tasks.

On the software side, hotels are planning to invest in strategic software (32%) for their business to increase guest engagement (51%) and better leverage big data as part of their IT approach, however 37% are currently not using big data in a meaningful way and a large percentage of hoteliers see their ‘analytics maturity’ as significantly lacking in comparison to their competitors.  This may indicate that there’s a lack of education or a lack of sufficient solutions to enable hoteliers with the ability to leverage data analytics.  With this topic still in the infancy stages in Hospitality the answer is likely both.    

These data points are just a sampling of the many illuminating metrics inherit in the inforgraphic, and help to truly demonstrate the critical technology trends driving IT decision-making in the lodging space today.  Network connectivity, information security, data analytics, and guest engagement strategies can be overwhelming for any hotelier – but it doesn’t have to be.  Extreme’s purpose-built Hospitality solutions offers an answer to all of these questions in one location from one source, simplifying the discussion and allowing you to get back to what you do best: delivering the best experience for your guests.

For more information or to speak with one of our Hospitality specialists, visit our HITEC landing page or our Hospitality landing page, or visit the Extreme Booth at this year’s HITEC Conference in Toronto, Booth #2315!