Dynamic, powerful, personal: the modern hotel experience is out of the reach of legacy technology

The bar for how hotels and their partners attract, engage, and retain guests has been reset and is raising fast as customers and the expectations they bring with them change. Delivering genuine customer personalization, and being able to price and deliver it dynamically based on real-time insights and data, is now one of the single most important sources of competitiveness and value in the hotel sector.

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Cost-consciousness, expert customer deal seekers, and new guest demographics with different tastes and modes of interaction are changing the face of the market. Recent research shows how, for example, hotels need to figure out how to serve Gen Z customers, with a very different set of expectations and behaviors than their Gen X and Boomer predecessors. Gen Z are effectively taking on the role of being their own travel agents, using social media and other online platforms to research, book, and curate unique experiences.

Dynamic personalization is a critical success factor

Personalization as a driver of customer revenue and loyalty isn’t new thinking, of course. But now, far more than before, the ability to deliver personalized experiences, offers, and engagement is a lynchpin of the consumer market. As this McKinsey report notes - 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions - and 76% percent get frustrated when this doesn’t happen.

This is mirrored across the hotel and wider hospitality sectors as both the behaviors and expectations of customers change. The ability to deliver ‘hyper-personalized’ deals, dynamically priced, and to upsell wider joined-up experiences that build on more than the room and amenities is vital. The ability to personalize from the get-go with distribution, and to do it fast, is critical.

Legacy tech puts on the brakes

This all sounds very logical, of course. But the challenge facing many hotel organizations, is the technologies they work with and rely on, make this vision very difficult to achieve.?

Hotels and their partners typically rely on a diverse set of software tools and platforms to capture bookings, operate, and provide guest services. Sold by different vendors, they work together with a maze of integrations – which provide a point of failure and require support in their own right.

Working with a patchwork of legacy systems that aren’t joined up, living in their silos, limits businesses. They are a resource drain, requiring specific skills to learn, operate, support, update, and maintain. They may lack new features or development impetus on the part of their vendors. They need unique logins, provide different user interfaces, and bring different training requirements, upgrade paths, pricing, and contract terms.

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Above all of this, the very real brake that legacy tech places on hotel organizations and their partners is the ability to effectively deliver immediate joined-up personalized experiences across and beyond the lifecycle of a booking. With an ongoing generational guest shift and a world of self-service, digital experiences, and acute deal-seeking this is crucial. It’s not an exaggeration to say outdated legacy tech stunts innovation.

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Building the future, now

Customers expect better and only hospitality businesses that have the vision and tenacity to shift away from legacy systems to digital-first infrastructure will thrive in a new era of travel. There is a huge opportunity for progressive businesses to differentiate themselves and grow by adapting.

This landscape has steered IBS Software into transforming our platform for hotels and hospitality, notably with the acquisition of Above Property Services (APS) . APS is a digital pioneer with a single cloud platform, reinventing hotel software from the ground up, optimized for the hotel enterprise sector. Over the last decade, its platform has raised the bar for speed, flexibility, and stability for travel and hospitality freeing operators from the limitations of legacy, monolithic technologies.

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Adding cutting-edge CRS, PMS, and RMS capabilities, all in a single, cloud-based modular platform, means we will be able to offer a truly unified experience to the hotel and hospitality industry that seamlessly manages the entire customer journey from booking to fulfillment. All this helps hotels transform the way they attract customers, fulfilling demand at every step of the buying journey – and fundamentally enhancing the consumer experience.

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As Skift ’s Justin Dawes put it in his write-up , “The acquisition means that IBS Software can now offer a full suite of products to manage a hotel company’s major operations — not common in the hotel tech industry.”

Acknowledging and addressing the technology silos that underpin and drag the hotel industry is a crucial mindset. If anchored to the legacy platforms and tools that many hotel businesses rely on, the bright future is going to retreat ever more quickly into the distance.

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Peter Krebs is SVP and Head – Travel & Hospitality Solutions at IBS Software , a leading SaaS solutions provider to the travel industry globally, managing mission-critical operations for customers in the aviation, tour and cruise, hospitality, and energy resources industries.