2022 is here, and everyone might be having their own forecasting on the hotel tech trends for the year. This helps to project a better strategic plan for your hotels to adapt and transform. Let’s zoom in and detect the upcoming emerging hotel techs, the ones that hotels should be keeping up to for this year.

Here are our takes on the upcoming trends in hospitality technology for 2022.

Hotel apps

Mobile has been becoming an essential part of any travelers’ experiences. Having a dedicated hotel app for your guests to book and manage a room reservation, making payments, online check-in/check-out, digital key room access, contact the hotel front desk, and more are expected to initiate a total contactless hotel technology experience. Making hotel procedures less complicated, and allowing seamless guests communication.

AI technology

Artificial intelligence (AI) has advanced itself and strengthened itself to be reliable as well as beneficial. Slowly, AI is taking over all the human grunt works, leaving your employees to do what they are best at. Improving work performances and better human resources allocations.

AI technology can also analyze data, statistics to assist hoteliers in making better decisions, helps personalize guests’ experiences based on their previous stays. This collected information contributes to retaining current customers and attracting potential customers profiles.

AI technology makes such an impact on the hospitality industry, assisting human staff to bypass the grunt work and to focus on what they are better at.

Virtual & Augmented Realities

These technologies are to the simulation of the world, mimicking reality into the digital world. Many hotels have been working on their virtual reality (VR) hotel tours. It gives guests a sense of hotel space, environment, atmosphere, and the property’s facilities.

While VR might take the actual surrounding off the ground completely, and replace them with a digital one. Augmented Realities (AR) technology tends to enhance it in real-time. Hotels can easily apply AR technology with AR headphones, glasses. These enable customers to discover the hotels through the graphic lenses of AR glasses, a lively tour providing in multiple languages translations.

Many have been compared AR to VR without a thorough understanding of both technologies. In fact, they complement each other and cost quite a budget. In return, they provide exceptional guests experiences.

AR and VR technologies have been around for decades, finally taking their steps up in the hospitality industry, bringing visualization benefits for not only hoteliers but the customers as well.

Smart Technology so-called Sustainability Tech

With the current advanced smart technology, hoteliers can program to turn the lighting system on or off, dimmer or brighter in a certain area, adjust AC temperature, and activate the heating system accordingly to the hotel presets thanks to the integrated sensor built-in camera. Everything is automatically carried out by smart technology either in the lobby area or in guests’ private rooms. Such sustainable hospitality technology helps hoteliers to reduce energy waste as much as possible.

Facial Recognition Technology

It might sound futuristic a couple of years back, but absolutely very “in” at the moment. Even your mobile device is having such a feature, there is no reason why not put this technology to use onto the rest. In a few smart hotels around the world, guests grant access to the elevator, their reserved rooms, and other hotel facilities with face recognition devices: quick, paperless/keyless, and data recorded on the system.

Big Data

Hotels welcome guests on a daily basis, the information input received from the customers is massive. Have you ever wondered where those data would go? Data upon entering the system will be categorized and analyzed to interpret customers’ behaviors and later served for the decision-making process.

The above pretty much explains how big data works. A collection of customers data to generate insights helps to further personalize guests’ experiences for future stays.

The numerous data input daily from the hotel front desk cannot be put to waste. These are big data, which should be analyzed and interpreted for hotels to better serve their guests in future stays.

Cybersecurity

Due to the large data volume from guests including sensitive information such as guests’ identity info, along with their credit card, hackers never miss their chance to attack the hotel’s security. As the result of the recent pandemic, people are found working from hotels, and getting their business info exposed apparently is not on anyone’s agenda. Up your hotel security’s matter is not a question but is crucial to moving forward.

The SaaS

Most of the mentioned technologies are packaged in a SaaS product model. It is cost-effective, built on a cloud-based infrastructure, and grows along with your business. Cutting down a huge budget in hardware investment, complex maintenance/update management, and on-site IT support teams to monitor the system 24/7. The growing adoption of SaaS models has been shaping the hospitality industry in improving its traditional operations to scale up efficiently at a reasonable budget.

The SaaS product model has been around for a long, however recently received support from the hospitality industry due to its efficiency and effectiveness.

It meanwhile defines the future hospitality management solutions has to be cloud-based, flexible, integrate effortlessly with other technology. CiHMS certainly fits the puzzle here as being an all-in-one cloud-computing hospitality management solution your hotel would ever need. Thanks to Open API, integration with 3rd party software is straightforward and trouble-free.

Hospitality has always been such a competitive industry. Technology keeps on evolving and is wiggling its way to becoming stable in the future of hospitality. It allows hotels to deliver unrivaled accommodation to their customers while maximizing the current business resources, optimizing its operations, reducing the expenses, and staying afloat and relevant with the present. Helping hotels to be responsive, make data-driven decisions, improve their processes and eventually transform.

Just as Jeanne W. Ross, MIT Sloan’s Center for Information Systems Research did say:

“Clearly, the thing that’s transforming is not the technology — the technology is transforming you.”

Nobody knows what the future holds, knowing all the hotel technology trends in 2022 does not mean you have to implement them all. Pick a few relevant technologies that bring immediate benefits and are most valuable to your hotel to start out with, the remaining shall soon follow.

The new normal has been shaking up everyone’s daily life routines in one way or another. It also altered our perceptions, habits, and behaviors toward direct human interaction distinctively. On the brink of recovery post-pandemic, contactless technology appears to be favorable by both hoteliers and guests as a vigorous effort in reducing the underlying risk of germs exposures while delivering highly personalized guests experiences.

With the innovative contactless technology, hotel guests are capable of going full-on “contactless mode” throughout their customer’s journeys. Hoteliers can eliminate the excessive sanitizing protocols aligning to COVID-19 compliance standards, and avoid invading their guests’ safety zone unintentionally. It creates a truly seamless digital experience throughout the entire guests’ journey. Does that sound familiar? Did it ring any bell? You might have guessed it right. All of those depict the smart hotel model in action, which we had briefly touched on in our previous blog here. In today’s blog, we would like to go under the technology and reveal to you the actual things that make all the contactless experiences possible.

The innovative contactless technology forays into hospitality can enhance guest experiences up a notch.

The Kiosk chaos

To prevent human contact upon arrival, many hotels had introduced self-check-in kiosks available at the front desk, without knowing how much it would add up. The kiosk itself is gradually turning into a constant cleaning station for the hoteliers to take care of, becomes the main concern for guests as soon as they arrive, such as who was using the kiosk before them, the time interval in between two cleaning sessions, did they come right before the cleaning session started or ended. Before you know it, the long check-in queue starts to jeopardize your lobby’s operations.

Self-check-in kiosks might have been a breakthrough technology a decade ago, but are no longer a surprise in today’s practice. We can easily find all types of self-help, self-booking, self-payment kiosks in airports, hospitals, museums, amusement parks, zoos, malls, and so on. These kiosks can be a pain for maintenance and require quite a decent budget to invest.

Check-in Digitally – Room Card goes Keyless

The majority of hotel guests are actively on their smartphones, why don’t hotels take advantage of this? That means building a mobile app for your guests to not only book directly with your hotels but can also check-in through it. Better yet, have their room key digitalized and send it to their phone right after they completed the check-in process.

Hotel check-in counter might no longer be necessary. Guests can proceed with their check-in through the mobile app, and get the access key right automatically.

Hmm, hold on! What if your hotel was built before such technology even existed? The reconstruction is not ideal at the moment but going keyless is still your goal? Check out OpenKey. It’s as easy as plug-and-play. Without replacing your lock, OpenKey supports different types of locking systems. If your locks aren’t listed, just contact their support team for further modifications. OpenKey is quick and extremely affordable. It’s the best option to go keyless fast and easy.

CiHMS Hospitality Guest App for the rescue

We have your back, our CiHMS clients! Once your guests complete the check-in process which can be done right on their phone, a digital key shall be sent via the Guest App and easily accessible 24/7 anywhere they go at their fingertip. No more plastic room keys to carry around and less trouble worrying about losing it.

Digital keys can allow guests to enter the common lobby, lounge, elevator, spa, and more. Hoteliers receive reports on their guests’ experience, acknowledge their preferences better, understand their behaviors, and get to serve them better in their future stays. It cuts down on the paperwork, documentation, and efforts of your staff. Your hotels can skip the front desk if you want to. Afraid your lobby might end up looking empty? It’s a great location for juice bars, shops, florists, or any retail that fits your hotel’s concept.

Beyond the digital experience

Meanwhile, hoteliers get to enjoy more perks with CiHMS Guest App and the CiHMS hotel PMS than just that. Housekeeping, room services, and laundry requests from your guests can be filed directly on the app and sync in real-time. Engaging with your guests through the app to receive feedback and ensure your hotels provide their requests in a timely manner.

A robust PMS would help hotels to transform their operations

Instead of dining in the restaurant down in the lobby, guests are now ordering fancy in-room dining through the app. The food shall be delivered to your room by robots with a ping on your phone when they arrive at the door or simply set out in the hall if guests are not willing to be in contact directly with the hotel staff.

Many have thought the contactless experience in a hotel would never make it here to stay, then hey, here came the pandemic. We realize hotels will never be the same again, at least before the pandemic. The recent COVID-19 outbreak has been the catalyst in boosting the hospitality digital transformation at full speed. It makes us – the hospitality geeks – appreciate the change and be aware of our customers’ constant shift in behavior. At CiHMS, we unravel the complication for our clients with the powerful cloud computing hospitality management solution integrated with numerous hospitality modules and guest apps to meet your hotel needs while making your customers happy. If you haven’t checked out CiHMS yet, contact our team and get your demo today. The contactless era is here, and are you ready yet? Indeed, we are.

Tourism brings in jobs, economic opportunities, and wealth to the country. It contributes a significant amount to GDP earnings and is the main source of income for the entire nation. While delivering such advantages, the tourism sector can be harmful to the local environment due to the excessive tourist demands resulting in a large number of plastics & food wastes, overuse of water and energy supplies, and the social life of the local communities. The permanent carbon footprints unintentionally ruin many natural travel destinations for good. Others are struggling to maintain and protect their national heritage while accommodating tourists regularly by issuing laws, and tourist taxes to preserve the destinations’ beauty and the local lifestyle. The shift over to sustainable tourism was not an overnight event, but a progress of the increasing consumer sentiment and corporate social responsibilities.

“Green” tourism is vital to a country’s economic to avoid over-tourism or ruining the attraction forever.

The fast-paced technology development has eased hospitality in making strides to becoming eco-friendly without leveraging the heavy financial burden. In order to transform into a green industry, hospitality has been gradually tapping into certain tactics to keep up with the sustainable bandwagon:

Smart energy and water-saving management.

With the integration of a motion and temperature camera detector, the central AC system automatically adjusts the hotel’s overall temperature to maintain at a certain level instead of manually setting your AC temperature to a specific degree permanently. The sensor also helps turn on/off, brighter or dimmer the lighting systems in the common areas, lobbies, hallways when guests arrive or leave the room depending on the time of day.

Hotels can take this up a notch by the installment of LED lights, which consume up to 80% less energy and last 25 times longer compared to traditional light bulbs. Imagine the electricity bill cut for your hotels by the end of the year, this saving alone would allow your hotel to invest in other modern facilities, going out of the way to spoil your guests.

Replacing all lightbulbs to LED lights save tremendous amount of hotel energies realistically. Integrated technology allows hotels to set time limit on showers and other amenities without influence guests’ experiences.

Smart shower time limitation with integrated LED lights flashing once the time is almost up triggered guests to consciously save water of their own will without impacting or sacrificing guests’ comfort.

Forgoing daily cleaning

In-room housekeeping is an added value complimentary service that guests enjoy. However, the laundry workloads behind daily cleaning would be traumatizing for any guests at the scenes. The detergent and bleach solvents water waste are unnecessary. Acknowledging your guest in opting out of the daily cleaning properly by rewarding incentive loyalty points or discount vouchers to other hotel facilities would lead to massive cost savings and environmental benefits. Many hotels have made these choices available via hotel mobile devices or mobile apps, enabling their guests to comfortably select the options at their own pace.

Leaving the daily cleaning option on hospitality applications for guest to decide enables guests be preserved toward the environment.

Digitize the use of paper

Eliminating all menus, reservations, program flyers, and other hotels in-room compendiums and replacing them with a digital guest room tablet or a large touch screen interactive monitor at lobby area would dramatically reduce the number of paper, cardboard, and plastic waste in hotels operations. Offering room upgrades with promotions, spa services, and dine-in experiences encourage your guests to spend more while keeping in touch and communicating with your guests through the conveniences of technology.

Effective food waste management

Hospitality’s food waste has become a major concern worldwide and is often called out by the press to be actively responsible to lower food waste at the minimum. The recent technology helps the kitchen come up with an ultimate menu that achieves wasting food supply by tracking records on kitchen waste on a daily basis. Furthermore, tracking guests’ food preferences and eating schedules in their guest profiles to personalize their food journey upon their arrival to minimize food waste aggressively.

Moving forward in sustainability tourism requires the hotel to up its technology game. Such can be found in the smart hotel model. It successfully achieves eco-friendly services publicly, and cost-effectively internally. The advantages of smart hotels did not end there, a dedicated blog on this topic was done to justify its power here. Converting to another hotel model might be a strategic move and needs careful consideration and thorough planning, then investing in an adequate hospitality management solution to precisely operate your hotels from housekeeping to your Food & Beverage in one single platform is a much easier step for hoteliers to consider.

Choosing a powerful hospitality management solution to fit your hotels operations and stay sustainable to the environment can be tricky. CiHMS is here for the rescue.

Receiving centralized reports to keep you in check for multiple properties in real-time, accessible from anywhere anytime, and trouble-free integration with other hospitality software via Open API are the benefits of a cloud-based hospitality management solution. It brings you as close to a smart hotel model as you can get. We are the proud developer of the all-in-one cloud computing hotel management software – CiHMS. The ultimate hospitality management solution that grows with your hotels, keeps being innovative to utilize cutting edge technology in turning the hospitality sector green.

Apart from the above tactics, what other initiatives can the hospitality industry possibly take to meet the sustainable tourism goals? Share with us in the comment section down below! Together, let’s save the earth, one thing at a time!

The controversy surrounding rate parity in the hospitality industry hasn’t been resolved, but rather escalated critically and became illegal in most of Europe. This topic takes a complicated stand and is often seen as unbeneficial to the hotel’s stakeholders. It also poses challenges that if hoteliers do not respond well with a favorable strategy to be better positioned, it might be “out of parity” and unable to get the best out of third-party distribution networks. Then, what rate parity is all about, why does it exist in the first place, how to monitor and turn it to your advantage? CiHMS will lay them all out for you in this blog today.

What is Hotel Rate Parity?

By definition, hotel rate parity practices sell consistent room rates across all distribution channels. That means your room rate should remain the same, including on your hotel’s official website, regardless of OTA’s commission whether it’s high or low. However, in the real world, rate parity is practiced slightly differently compared to the fundamental concept. For instance, your superior room is listed at a $199 rate per night on your website. It should be quoted at $199 everywhere else, such as Expedia, Traveloka, Booking.com, Agoda, etc for the same room type, but would be found much higher on your own website.

The controversy of rate parity remains strong in the hospitality industry.

Why is Hotel Rate Parity Important?

Rate Parity is considered a solid core agreement in any typical OTA contract to prohibit hotels from undercutting the OTA rates on their website. It provides guests the price transparency they always look out for. No customers would like to experience being charged differently for the same products or services depending on the landing pages they’re on.

OTA channels are generally the easiest and effortless marketing tool for a hotel to gain its visibility and brand reputation. They contribute their share in boosting hotels’ revenue overall. It also helps hotels to capture and analyze their competitors’ pricing strategies to consider alternatives of their own.

The downside of Rate Parity

Revenue deficit

Everything comes with a cost. OTA channels are allowed to offer lower prices by cutting their commission. To stay in sync with the OTA contract agreement, hotels have to make sure to give out the lowest price possible to their OTAs partners. Although bringing more bookings from OTA channels, hotels actually lose out on revenues. Imagine paying a commission on top of your lowest room rate possibly, plus there is nothing to stop OTA channels from raising their commission rates and earning more while hotels suffer. This becomes a significant risk for your hotel’s profit.

If hotels have promotional plans, they ought to inform OTA channels due to their contracts’ obligations. However, if hotels want to opt-out of an OTA marketing campaign due to the lower price range might come back and hurt your brand reputation at last; there is no say in this matter, absolutely nothing at all! Frustrated yet? It is why rate parity is considered an unfair trade price and has been banned in most European regions.

The “in parity” struggle

To remain “in parity”, you have to monitor your room rate across all distribution channels. This might have been challenging in the past, however can easily be done by utilizing a powerful hospitality management software (PMS) in place. Having different commission rates can result in different net incomes from various OTA channels. If not monitored by a distribution channel linked in your hotel PMS, it shall remain confusing, difficult, and time-consuming to manage.

Rate parity guarantees price transparency for customers while requiring less internal marketing overheads from hoteliers.

Monitoring your Hotel Rate Parity

To prevent violation of the rate parity, hotels and distribution channels have to keep track of the rate parity implementation by either manually using metasearch channels to randomly check their rate across the distribution channels lists and make sure they got listed for the same price.

Otherwise, this issue can be resolved with a rate shopper integrated into your hotel PMS. Not only tracking your hotel room rate, but also your competitors’ rate in real-time based on your own set defined criteria. Rate shopper alerts you regarding parity issues, identifying the markets’ high demands with comprehensive reports. All configurations are to aid in a better pricing strategy for your business. A demo on CiHMS’s Rate Shopper is also available for you to experience. Contact us for a quick demo!

Rate shopper Dashboard

Turning rate parity challenges into your hotel advantages

Rate parity jeopardizes your hotel revenues and profits. Hoteliers establish that sustainable profits would come from direct bookings, however, driving your guests away from OTAs channels is insanely difficult and rather ambitious per se. Distribution channels such as OTAs have huge marketing budgets and often are willing to go out of their way with discounts, loyalty points, redeem hotel stays, complimentary nights, spa vouchers, and so on. Like everything else in life, problems often come with solutions.

Sufficient reason for direct bookings

Without affecting the actual room rate on your hotel’s official website, consider giving out free parking services, early check-in hours, late check-out hours, complimentary meals, or drinks instead. These bonuses are the reasons for your guests to prefer booking directly with you over the OTAs’ websites.

Segmented target audiences

Market exclusive promotions to closed member networks such as Facebook fans, Twitter/Instagram followers, etc. Reach out to guests previously booked through OTAs for a special discount if they book directly with you on their next trip.

Seamless Direct Booking Process

Make sure to improve the booking process on your website to be as smooth as possible. Easy to navigate, no frustration or glitches, looks, and feeling secure while booking is something you should look for. The better experience they have the less likely you would lose direct traffic on your website.

Leverage your visibility on metasearch sites

In order to approach your audience directly, try to appear on the metasearch sites as further up as possible. Starting out with focusing on your hotel rank on the search result of a set of keywords relevant to your hotels. This would help convert all search results to visit your official website, becoming your hotel’s potential leads rather than ending up at the OTAs.

Rate parity policy has been banned in Australia, France, Italy, Belgium, and other European countries, as it puts small business interests at disadvantage. Long-term speaking, the practice is totally not beneficial for hotels nor their brands, or their customers. The lowest pricing structure arguably hurts brand reputation at last. High commission level makes it incompetent for hotels with their direct booking tactics to compete with indirect distribution channels’ bookings. Rate parity obviously serves OTAs most and is continually a controversial topic.

Therefore, hotels have to establish their effort in revamping marketing activities to not be dependent on OTAs channels. Equipped your hotel with an efficient cloud-based hotel PMS and a rate shopper integrated to stay on top of the game. Get updated with all your hotel room rates and availability, easily synchronize your rates across all distribution networks, and manage all reservations, bookings at the dashboard quickly and reliably at your convenience. Enforce rate parity to your advantage and practice rate parity to favor you instead.

After months of preparation with back and forth negotiation during the ups and downs of the pandemic, we are proud to announce that our CiHMS Distribution Channel Manager is now connected directly with the travel giant Booking.com and is the first connectivity partner of Booking.com in Vietnam. Just in time to boost your year-end sales for the most special season of the year.

CiHMS Distribution Channel Manager now is connected directly with Booking.com

CiHMS clients now earn direct connections with Booking.com, adding the extra onto the OTA distribution channels list we had announced at the Direct OTA channels connected with CiHMS Distribution Channel Manager” blog post. While Booking.com might be just another OTA channel for some, it has managed to gain market share exponentially with almost no resistance, despite the economic crisis due to the pandemic.

Booking.com has always sided with customers and they do amazing customer orientation. Apart from that, Booking.com offers additional valuable services such as complimentary transportations, drinks, and even room upgrades by converting loyalty points. That is why they continuously win their customers’ loyalty and support. It also means their customer base is huge and diversified, a big plus for any hotel’s brand visibility coverage.

Getting connected directly to Booking.com was not entirely smooth sailing. It had a long list of requirements to fulfill. Their partners have to have strict standards on security systems with PCI DSS certified, PII compliances in place; whether or not their partners’ development team masters the latest technologies and are up to their game. The active room keys on the systems, hotel coverage, and the current OTA partners’ list are also concerns. Without a doubt, Booking.com is the toughest OTA channel we have cracked so far.

CiHMS Distribution Channel Manager can easily integrate with hotel management software, especially our powerful cloud-computing hotel management system – CiHMS. Interested in our CiHMS solution and looking for a demo? Contact our team today.

Digital transformation in the Tourism and Hospitality industry has received aggressive support from the government authorities. Numerous businesses are striving every day to digital transformation as fast as possible to race against the constant development of digital 4.0 technology. At VinHMS, the digital transformation has begun since the very beginning and is no longer a “new” concept for us to grasp. This required intensive kick-start training to make sure every VinHMS-er is on the same page and shares the same mission. 

Then, why don’t we start this training much earlier on? For the students with tourism and hospitality majors who are still in school to experience the real digital transformation process, to practice their knowledge into actual real-life context without waiting for their internship or after the graduation. That was how VinHMS’s educational collaboration program started aiming to introduce our hospitality management solution – CiHMS from the source.

In November, VinHMS had successfully signed the educational collaboration program agreement with all the Tourism – Hospitality departments at the 3 highly reputed universities in Ho Chi Minh city first, including Hoa Sen University, Van Lang University, and Ton Duc Thang University. The program shall be applied to all universities across our nation soon after that. Once in the program, VinHMS will be providing the hotel PMS – CiHMS to the university campuses FREE of charge to use internally. The students shall earn the opportunity to approach, practice, and implement the software throughout their years.

The online signing ceremony with Van Lang University 

After the implementation of CiHMS solutions and completing the hand-over process to Hoa Sen University, VinHMS has received a tremendous amount of positive feedback from the students and faculty, this is the joy and pride the CiHMS team share individually, and VinHMS in general. The software will become a reliable support tool for teaching, helping students to gain their chance in practice and confront the real world rather than learning this knowledge through textbooks. 

In addition, VinHMS and the universities shall encourage and motivate each other to exchange professional knowledge and expertise and collaborate to organize beneficial seminars for the students, striving to better understand and strengthen our CiHMS solution’s features and functionalities in the future. The VinHMS’s educational collaboration program is our way to “Paying it Forward” to the younger generation, the future leaders of Vietnam’s Tourism – Hospitality industry. 

The pandemic has been an unfortunate turn of events for the past two consecutive years, leaving the tourism and hospitality industries suffering its impact the hardest.

The recovery of tourism and hospitality post COVID-19 is happening now

However, we are truly excited and curious awaiting to see how both industries resume their glory. If we were passively trying to cope with the coronavirus outbreak in the year 2020, and almost two-thirds of the year 2021, the government has been actively taking progressive actions, steadily picking up where we left and finally moving forward.

The global tourism landscape

According to a McKinsey.com report, the tourism expenditure had dropped sharply to at least 35 to 48 percent globally, especially the international tourism sector that accounted for approximately USD 1.3 trillion in export revenue. That was more than 11 times the loss of the 2009 economic crisis, crazy yet? Unintentionally, putting over 120 million tourism jobs at stake, as well as small and medium-sized tourism enterprises have been forced to close down.

Travelers’ habitual shift – the challenges deriving from your customers

Ticking off their bucket list

The travel demands have surged significantly in 2021, confirmed by 75% of travelers who took the research by Expedia Group. People have already envisioned their next vacation as soon as the restriction is lifted, creating their bucket-list destinations which they have never considered to do pre-pandemic, all due to year-long lockdowns.

Spending long term lockdown consecutively for the last 2 years has affected us all in travel behavior and habits

Take drivable leisure trips

Travelers are eager to be up on their feet again, has been noticed a drastic change in habits and behaviors. They prefer to travel within drivable locations, either by private or rental cars, which provides them a sense of safety. That is the result of sudden authorized restrictions applied whenever a new wave of outbreaks creeps in. It reassures that they can manage to get back home just in time before the lockdown takes place.

Prefer longer stay

The hybrid work has been adopted widely. This trend does not seem to settle down anytime soon and shall continue paving its path in the future. People take advantage of this flexible working to have longer stays holiday with their beloved ones to make up for the lost time.

Thorough research beforehand

If before, travelers searched for attractive landmarks, activities around town, nowadays their search priority shifted. A deeper search on the property, the facilities, the nearby neighborhoods, the amenities, and any related photos they can get their hands on is mandatory. Cancellations and cleanliness policies are also on top of the list. All to make sure they are in control and be ready for all the possibilities when things go sideways unnoticed.

No longer an impulsive holiday trip, guests are doing their background research before booking their travels

The open opportunities for hoteliers

Digitize your property

In other words, make your hotel known and reachable on the web. Promote your property across all available social media platforms and OTA channels. Focus on your targeting audiences. If you haven’t known who they are, it’s time to sit down and determine your potential customers.

Showcase your property profile with clear, accurate, and attractive photographs, which play a crucial role in the decision-making. The most concerning aspect any guest would always look for is room photos. This includes but is not limited to photo of the bed, bathroom, lobby & other facilities like swimming pools, conference rooms, fitness rooms, spas, shops, etc. They want to know what they will get, and they will expect no more no less.

Offer flexibility

The cancellations policy has become one of the concerns throughout the booking process. It is less likely for travelers to book non-refundable trips compared to pre-pandemic. Just risky in general. Giving guests a flexible cancellation policy would reinforce their purchase commitment. A case study of Eric Brown – an owner of a vacation home in Texas, USA on changing his strict 60 days cancellations to two weeks one had helped him to score 30+ bookings in a week.

Customers treasure the flexibilities while travelling, whenever the uncertainty is involved, especially post COVID-19

Active in communication

Tech-savvy guests are keen on exchanging information with the property before their arrival. Be available to assist your guests as needed to eliminate their undesired features that your property might be able to remove in advance. You perhaps sneak in a few incentives such as discounted meals, upgraded room, free parking, or spa vouchers and will be amazed at their voluntary spending on other expensive amenities and services during their stays in return.

Provide customer-oriented technologies

Everyone stays connected online whether they are on vacation or not. Get your hotels equipped with the latest technology software to stay relevant in this modern day. Start with hospitality management solutions or what others would call a hotel PMS. It is the central system of your hotel operations. Trust us, a PMS helps everything work seamlessly, efficiently and costs much less. If you haven’t had one in mind yet, check out our cloud-based hospitality management solution CiHMS and choose the best fit package for your hotel.

CiHMS is a cloud-based hospitality management solution that you would ever need: powerful yet flexible at your fingertip

Other technologies to look into are touchless experiences from check-in/check-out to the keyless entry of room cards and public areas, robotic technology for room delivery, laundry services pick-up/ drop-off, voice and facial recognition, etc. There are numerous technologies out there on the market, and these can be quite an investment. Again, understand your customers, know your priorities and select the best match for your property while exceeding your customer expectations.

What about Vietnamese tourism?

Although the international tourism sector in Vietnam took only 17% of the market share, its spending expenditure captured more than half of the whole tourism spending itself. Up to 80% foreign travellers to Vietnam are from Asian countries like China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. Many are looking forward to visiting Vietnam on their next vacation, whenever we are ready to open for international travels again. According to Vnexpress, 63.4% of Japanese are eyeing for Vietnam travel tours.

With such demands, the acknowledged challenge for Vietnam is to control the Covid infection cases. Then gradually lost its travel restrictions and eventually opened the borders by starting the vaccine passport program. To achieve such a scenario, the Vietnam government has been aggressively pushing the vaccine campaign at full speed.

The vaccine passport program has been widely applied in other countries across the globe. Vietnam is taking its first step toward this right direction, remarks the its first efforts in tourism recovery strategy

Many hotels are firm to evoke upcoming promotional travel tour packages as their marketing move. It can be tempting at first, but not sustainable in the long term and might come back to hurt you financially. International tourism might take time to resume its normal stage pre-pandemic. It is best to focus on the domestic tourism sector for now, which seems to shift toward high-end travel experiences after going through the long-term lockdown and not until they complete both vaccine doses.

The world post-COVID-19 fills with challenges and opportunities for the tourism and hospitality industries. There isn’t any clear sign of when the next outbreak will occur, and whether or not we will be able to control it. It is best to take small steps with caution, don’t you think?

CiHMS is a fairly new hospitality management solution in the market. We recently launched our software to the public amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Understanding the hardships and challenges a new PMS might have faced, we acknowledged the lack of practical operations on multiple business models’ practices at a much larger scale. Challenges come hand in hand with opportunities. In the midst of the pandemic, we had received an event to prove that our system is capable of big-scale at any time: 192 reservations – over 82,000 transactions, were routed into a single guest profile. Our clients were amazed at how massive the routing function can handle without missing any details.

With the help of the routing functionality, our customers welcomed a group of 200 people to quarantine during the pandemic at ease without a hassle system-wide

What does it mean by Routing Transaction?

In hotel operation, Routing is an action of forwarding charges/transactions in a set of reservations to a room, guest folio. This functionality allows hoteliers to manage all the transactions for the group in one spot. This tactic is quite common. For example, a company books several rooms for a corporate meeting and wants all room charges routed to one specific room for corporate payment. In this case, the routing for each room reservation sends rate and tax charges to that specified room.

All transactions of the group reservations will be forwarded to a specific room with the routing functionality

Routing options can be varied depending on the characteristics of the group. Typically, reservations can be routed by room charge only; room and laundry; room and breakfasts; or all charges. For our CiHMS PMS, we can customize options for routing depending on hotels’ operational needs. Giving flexibility in group reservations can help prevent unexpecting requests that hoteliers might not be able to see all through. Take last year as an example, we allowed routing rooms by TA (travel agents), which has been widely used when traveling was in season. It had sped up the check-in and check-out procedure for guests.

Routing in action

During the pandemic, the Vietnam government has called out the local hotels and resorts for help in providing accommodation for quarantined people. Some have voluntarily become “quarantine-friendly” hotels to contribute their share back to the community. Recently, one of our clients has joined this positive campaign and welcomed large groups of guests for long-term stays: 192 reservations for a quarantine period of 21 days.

• Serving 3 meals per day and snacks upon requests
• Room services and laundry were available
• Following the strict sanitary standards and “Safe to stay” policy to ensure the guests and employees working in a safe environment.
• All transactions regarding the group activities were forwarded to 1 single guest profile.

This “quarantine” experience has proved that CiHMS system capabilities can unleash PMS performance during a crisis, and our hospitality management solution is reliable.

Routing procedure is carrying out by front office staff for our guests, using CiHMS hospitality management solution

The 21 days went by in a click. Thanks to the routing functionality, our customer had successfully issued the VAT tax invoice with detail of 82,000+ transactions for the guests at the check-out tables.

We were blown away knowing such a massive number of transactions had routed for a reservation on the event. An OTA might pass over an average of 200-300 bookings for a group booking at the max. The group duration might fluctuate anywhere from 3 to 12 days top. Generally, this probably generates up to 10,000 transactions at best. If this pandemic did not happen, we would never know how many transactions a routing function can process. Again, our very high standard requirements in software development seemed to pay off.

At CiHMS, we strongly believe it’s not just another hospitality management solution, but also an opportunity for hotels to practice outside of their comfort zone, ready to adapt and transform with the constantly evolving world.

The Distribution Channel Manager (DCM) module developed within our hospitality management solution CiHMS aims to manage all your bookings from all OTAs in one platform. Is it necessary? Absolutely! With the help of a DCM, hotels can easily approach targeted customers through direct as well as indirect OTA channels. According to a recent study from D-Edge.com, OTAs have brought over 63% of the market share in the Europe region, and 61% in the Asia Pacific. Although the COVID-19 pandemic did slow down the travelers, the market share of OTA remains high.

Hotels often sign contracts with an OTA to be listed on the OTA’s website without any upfront fees. The OTAs only make money, which is calculated as a percentage of the room’s total value, once the reservation is successfully booked and paid. OTA is gaining its popularity with its huge marketing expenditure to attract customers around the world from TVCs to online advertising through social media and sponsorships, even spending a huge budget on billboards, various marketing channels to promote their brands. In general, it’s a low-risk investment to get connected with an OTAs channel, especially if your hotel has a limited budget for marketing.

Channel Manager in CiHMS – your ultimate hospitality management solution will centralize all your bookings on one platform, allowing you to manage, monitor, and modify easier, quicker while staying synchronized in real-team across all distribution channels

Each OTA is targeting different types of audiences. Understand who your potential customers are to match it with the OTA profile and get the brand visibility your hotel is seeking for. There are not one or two OTAs, but a couple of hundreds per se. Imagine logging in all of these OTAs to monitor, manage and update your hotel rooms manually. It is not only a boring job but also tedious.

Thanks to the CiHMS Distribution Channel Manager, you are getting connected with all the available OTAs either directly independently, or indirectly via distribution points. At the moment, our CiHMS is connecting directly to the 5 leading OTAs worldwide: Traveloka, Agoda, Expedia, Tripadvisor, and the latest: Trip.com and Booking.com and more to come.

“Here at CiHMS, we respect each and every client equally. CiHMS allows hotels to approach their valued guests responsively in their best interest,” said Mr. Hoang Nguyen – CEO of CiHMS. “Direct connection with leading OTAs globally helps hotels to scale and grow their guests’ list, simplify and improve their operational practices.”

CiHMS Distribution Channel Manager also enables direct OTA connections through public API technology. With this methodology, hotels can instantly get connected with their favorite OTAs directly with a single click. CiHMS is quite new to the market, but speeding up quite fast and thriving to exceed our customers’ satisfaction.

Have you checked out our DCM yet? Contact us for a free demo of CiHMS-DCM. To go in-depth on what a Distribution Channel Manager is and why hoteliers need one, check out the details in our previous article. Contact us for a free demo of CiHMS-DCM.

Customer acceptance of cashless payment has outrageously increased since the COVID-19 pandemic began. Although there is little medical study and evidence to support the transfer of virus via cash transaction, the fear is there and encourages customers to go cashless. Getting out of the house cashless is no longer unrealistic in this current timeline.

Cashless payment is not new but slowly adopted by merchants due to customer slow adaptation. COVID-19 hit the world by surprise and now, everyone is riding this cashless payment trend

Many would prefer to look for the “Card accepted here” sign before walking in the restaurants, supermarkets, or pharmacies. It brings the absolute convenience of quicker transactions, unnecessary human errors, irresistible discounts, and unexpecting loyalty points earned in exchange for mileage or gift cards. This payment trend has sneaked its way into the hospitality sector. Travelers, especially popular among international guests, are often keen on paying for their accommodations and dining through cards, e-wallet, or mobile apps. What does this mean to the hospitality industry? Any challenges and what will the upcoming payment trend be?

What cashless payment really is?

Cashless simply means no cash involved. Payment is cashless if it is made by cards or electronic methods instead of cash, and known as digital payments. This payment methodology has been widely used in amusement parks, festivals, concerts, fairs, during flights, etc. According to the Vietnam Insider, Vietnam market transaction value had soared 177% in the first half of 2020 compared to the same period in 2019. There are many different ways of cashless payment, these include:
1. Bank cards: Credit cards and debit cards are the most used payment forms globally.
2. Mobile wallet applications: There are numerous mobile wallet apps on the market for customers to choose from. This method of payment is quick and functional. Users can send, receive, and store money as they wish. MoMo, Viettel pay, Moca, Airpay, VNPT pay are the few e-wallet apps that have gained popularity in the Vietnam market. The government also has encouraged citizens to pay their utility bills, such as water, electricity, internet, and television cable bills through e-wallet apps.
3. QR code: it stands for Quick Response code, which is a pattern black square grid and can be read by smart devices such as mobile phones, tablets, and computers. After scanning the QR code into the devices would redirect customers to proceed with the payment on a certain payment gateway.

QR code is also a cashless payment method. It allows customers to proceed with the payment on their phone simply by scanning the QR code

4. NFC technology: is short for Near Field Communication. The technology enables users to pay by tapping a chip card onto a POS/ reader device. It can be credit, debit, wrist band or simply a smart card with a built-in chip using NFC technology. There are phones with NFC-enabled technology which can be linked to your e-wallet or bank cards.
5. Gift cards & vouchers: physical gift cards and vouchers or non-physical gift cards and vouchers (also known as e-gift cards, e-vouchers) are used for customer rewards and birthday presents.

Hospitality industry with cashless payment trend

Transaction speed

Undeniably fast transaction in all cashless payment transactions. Hotels now allow customers to deposit money into their keycard. Incorporating the NFC technology, customers can enjoy their stay without the need to carry their wallets around the property. It results in less waiting time for customers and avoids over-waiting queues.

NFC technology integrated into smartwatches, smart bands, smart cards allow customers to quickly pay for their transaction without entering their card pin or sign their payment slip

Security

Reducing the fraud of counterfeit money, human errors, robbery of cash internally and externally. It’s also easy to manage and control by the accounting system.

Brand image

Going cashless let hoteliers track customers’ behavior during their stays. Understand their favorite location within the hotel property, their most spending item, which dining restaurant they would prefer, and much more. From this information, hoteliers can easily record and serve their guests better, achieving customer satisfaction is no longer an “impossible mission”. Keeping up with technology would position your hotel brand above others in the industry. It builds customers’ trust and loyalty, keeps them coming back for their next trip.

Maximize sales and revenue

Due to the ease of payment, customers tend to enjoy and would be willing to spend more than they plan to on added-value products and services such as spas, private tours, brunch package, etc. To promote customers, a few hotels would offer generous discounts if their guest’s accumulated spending exceeds a certain amount at the time of checking out. It can later be exchanged for money and deducted right from their stay expenses, or later used for the next stay.

The challenges for the hotel industry

With endless advantages the cashless payment trend has brought into the hotel industry, the challenges are also there. Below are a few worth mentioned:

Security

While it is secured to go cashless for guests, it is challenging for the hoteliers to make sure their connection is not in breach and stable. Digital translation relies heavily on the Internet connection. To ensure your network is safe and always up and running means strict monitoring policy and IT staff to standby 24/7.

Digital transaction means a 24/7 stable internet connection. Otherwise, transaction failure can occur

Higher cost with credit/debit charging fees

Depending on the card authorizer, the processing fee might be different. If you own a hotel chain or multinational hotel corporation, you would be treated with special low processing fees, somewhere between 0% – 1%. Otherwise, the normal rate would apply to your guests’ transactions.

Digital transaction knowledge update

At the current rate of technology development, digital transactions are constantly getting created and updated. Be in sync with the new releases and the latest tech to avoid any risk and fraud regarding digital transactions for guests as well as your hotel.

Customer denial to go cashless

The fear of overspending if you do not “see” and feel the money going out of your pocket is stopping customers from moving forward with the cashless payment trend.

The cashless payment trend has been more accepted by customers in recent years due to the COVID-19 pandemic. People are willing to change without hesitation and their adaptation rate is surprisingly high. If it would take an average of 10 years for the old generations to get used to digital transactions, COVID-19 has cut the time by 5th. In 2 years, cashless payment has been casually used on a daily basis. Not only the hospitality industry experienced it, but it is applied in all industries worldwide.

Customers are now expecting us to move on and practice the new contactless experience trend. Front-desk staff can be replaced with self-check-in and check-out via phone or tablets, housekeeping request and room-services getting requests through hotel apps, self-service restaurant receiving orders through tablets integrated into guests table. This is not a fictional movie, it is the reality now. The time is here, and if you are not riding this cashless payment wave, you are missing out. Are you aware of this cashless payment trend? If yes, have you applied it to your hotel practices? How about a contactless experience? Any plan on it yet? Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

We also have an upcoming regarding the Cashless payment trend coming up shortly this week. Register to join us now. There is a limited offer for this webinar. More information can be found @Live webinar: Payments trends in the hotel sector. We see you then!