ISORG.

Saturday, October 2, 2010

HOW INFO-COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES CHANGE HOTEL ROOM RESERVATION SERVICES

What is Information Communication Technology

Generally, Information Communication Technology refers to the development of digital technologies to assist in the processing, communication and storage of information. Improvements in technologies had made it possible for shelves of written information to be compressed into digital forms which can then be stored and transferred quickly and conveniently. Over the years, Information Communication Technology had been adopted widely as it had tremendously improved the efficacy of business processes, and had provided much savings in terms of storage spaces and transfer of information.

Integration of Information Communication Technology in hotel operations

In the recent years, many hotels had integrated Information Communication Technology in their day-to-day operations. Advancements in technologies had brought many conveniences to both hotel guests and staff. For instance, registration procedures had been shortened and simplified, and customers’ room services requests are also better attended to. The table below summarizes the changes in hotel operations before and after the integration of Information Communication Technologies.

Hotel operations	Past	Present	Advantages	Disadvantages
Checking in/out	Hotel guests have to queue up to check-in and check-out personally with the reception. The process is time consuming.	Hotel guests can check-in and out using check-in machines and key-drop box. Process is also shortened as rooms would have been pre-allocated if guests had made bookings online.	Procedures are shortened and guests’ waiting time is reduced. Traffic flow within the hotel lobby is improved. Hotels can cut down on manpower at the reception counter	Processes will be disrupted when machines break down. Some guests might not be familiar with processes. Hotel guests might feel less welcomed due to little interaction with hotel staff.
Room service	Hotel guests have to personally visit or call the reception to make room service requests.	Hotel guests can make request via calls or computer systems.	Conveniences are brought to hotel guests as they can make their requests via computer systems or phone and does not have to make trips to and fro the reception.	Reduced interaction between hotel guests and staff.
Utilities	Hotel guests are to switch on electricity and air-conditioning systems manually. Guests often leave the electricity supply for the facilities on whether or not they are in the room for convenience. This is eco-unfriendly and incur high costs.	Hotel guests would be required to plug in their card-key into a slot in order to activate the power supply. Power supply will be automatically cut off when guests remove the card-key, before they can leave the room. This way, there would be more energy savings.	Energy wastage is reduced. Energy costs would be lower and hotels would become more eco-friendly.	Nil

The improvement of information technology also increases the productivity as new system such as “information agents”(software programs) helps to gather information from various sources on behalf of human user to achieve their goals i.e the information of the client particulars.

Comparing the past, whereby there isn’t internet services, in order to make a reservation, the only way is to make a booking either by phone, or personally go down to reserve. sadvantage will be time consuming for the user itself, and also the management actually need to hire extra labour to handle the calls, attend to the client etc. with the improved of technology, it helps to cut down this kind of unnecessary cost which on the other hand, can be utilize on other things.

Using information agent, recently some hotel have developed an information system for the hotel service domain, which is called an integrated hotel reservation service. The architecture consist of 3 main parts, user interface agents, hotel service agents as information agents and a hotel service manager as an information broker.

– User interface agents: Each user interface agent represents a human user. It

trustfully keeps information such as user profiles and reservations made. On

behalf of its user, it contacts hotel service agents for searching and booking

a hotel or cancellation of an earlier reservation. A graphical interface (GUI)

is used to navigate the interactions between the user interface agent and its

user.

– Hotel service agents: Each hotel service agent encapsulates a web site, which

provides hotel reservation services. In an open environment as the World

Wide Web is located in, new web sites and thus their associated hotel service

agents can dynamically join into or leave the system.

– Hotel service manager: The hotel service manager is designed to enable user

interface agents to find the matching hotel service agents, which can handle

their requests. It acts as a matchmaking middle agent [29] between them.

Hotel service agents advertise and de-advertise their capabilities to the hotel

service manager, while user interface agents query for matching hotel service

agents to serve the requests of human users.

Unlike the olden days, with the enhanced technology, making a reservation online now is made safe and much more convenience compared to the past. However, this also means that some people will be out of their job as technology has taken over them. Taken into consideration, this might be 1 of the disadvantages of it.

Just recently, hurrahs.com, just launch a major revamp of its room reservation system. The system includes a feature to allow user to book multiple rooms at a time just with a simple click. If comparing to the past system, let say if you were to travel in groups and this of course means that the room needed will be more than 1. With this improvement, user can now book faster with ease. Other feature of the newly improved system also include making changes to your reservation. In the past, after making a reservation at Harrahs.com, if you wanted to make changes to your reservation, you’d have to cancel your original booking and start from scratch. From here on out, you’ll be able to change several aspects of your reservation without starting over.

Information technology is growing rapidly nowadays and this has actually made our life easier in several aspects i.e now we can actually travel, see and get to know what’s happening around us in any parts of the world within split second. Reservation of hotel room system is just one of the example of it and of course there is actually more to it if we go on to further research what’s going on around us.

Examples:
-Asiatravel is a B2C (business to consumer) e-Commerce transaction broker. It provides information and reservations for consumers and this information can be at their fingertips at all times.
Asiatravel.com allows us to book a hotel room only by entering all the particulars of the customers including credit card details for payment. One can even select the country you are heading to and there will be a list of recommended hotels for you to choose from. Asiatravel.com has 2 types of hotel bookings, Prepay and Pay on Check Out. AsiaTravel.com offer hotels with Instant Availability and Instant Confirmation with the option to Prepay or Pay at Hotel.
All the hotels and resorts on their website provide full information, such as rates and discounts, graphics of rooms, sports or recreation facilities, function rooms for meetings and seminar purposes or events, food and beverages facilities.
-AirAsia provides 24 hours toll free call hotline, e-mails for feedback, FAQs etc. This enhances the company's image of having good customer service and efficiency as customers are able to reach them at any time when needed.
-Zuji.com provides a wide number of hotels to choose from-63,000 hotels. There are no credit card fees for all bookings on ZUJI.com. It also allows quick search to preferred hotels as it allows one to search by star ratings & budget.

-Booking.com is also another provider which offers online hotel reservations and one distinct feature that can be seen on their webpage is that it shows reviews of different hotels of different countries,including ratings and the most recent booking date and time of the hotel. This provides consumers with a better idea of the different hotels and choose the one they desire.
Booking.com can now even be downloaded as an application for iphone and it has created its own account on facebook, which will attract even more potential consumers.

-However, there is no perfection in relying on these technologies as there may be cases of payment by stolen credit cards. Futhermore, the websites do not include detailed information of the hotels (rooms and services etc), hence customers are not able to verify for themselves the quality of the hotels. This may lead to disatisfaction and refund would mostly be impossible to be given.

Overall, Information Communication Technologies had made most aspects of the hotel operations faster and more convenient. This improvement is undoubted essential as customer on holidays are usually time-savvy and would not be satisfied if they are to be caught up in long waiting processes in the hotel. However, the implementation of Information Communication Technology might not be welcomed by certain groups of people such as the illiterate or older guests as they might not be able to understand and use the systems effectively. Also, with the use of technologies, there would be lesser interaction between hotel guests and staff, causing a reduction in sense of personal touch.

10:25 PM