The Think Tank topics gave me the opportunity to realize and confirm how important is nowadays technology and how important it is to the hospitality sector in order to keep being competitive in the market.
Actually we could say that it is essential to every sector of the economic life such as Luxury for example.
What sounds quite strange is that both Hospitality and, above all, Luxury do not really take advantages from using the last useful technology as they should.
Luxury hotel sites do not even use enough videos in order to better promote their room while, as Google said, millionaires prefer shopping on line.
On the other side I gained that a brand gets exclusivity by having different tech from their competitors.
What about the use of the Hotel Reputation Management?
Well I discovered that according to Google 50% of customer book 13 days after their first visit on a travel website because they take the time to get the most information they can from review site (such as Tripadvisor for example) in order to make the best choice and avoid bad surprises.
I always wonder if third site could get involved into conflict of interests but analyzing the working process of review site I discovered how useful and important is for hoteliers to rely their reputation management to well prepared and specialized expert such as review PRO.
Hoteliers need to understand how important review site are and they have to better realize that they cannot manage reputation manually because every additional review increases a lot the booking potential for a hotel.
I actually wondered about transparency and about fake reviews which can modify the final results and the way review sites manage them but I have to notify that they are smaller and smaller so In my personal opinion review site are enough reliable to attempt to their function.
The Augmented Reality is the session which had the greatest impact on me because of the utility that this location based service application may have in our daily life.
In fact, the expansion of the real world may, for example, change the interest that customers may have on new augmented reality books.
In the sector of the Mobile Outlook, Jean Robberecht, VP Marketing – Strategic Accounts of Fastbooking remind us the importance of 3 essential characteristics of any mobile application:
• Secure
• Easy
• Fast
In my personal opinion I think that this is the future which will replace the function of the concierge for example.
I think that technologic conferences such as the Think Tank are essential to hoteliers in order to save money and at the same time improve their productivity and competition.
