A connected digital economy in hospitality means news ways of interacting with customers and receiving bookings, as Aron Libinson of
InterContinental Hotels Group explains in this TV show.
Hospitality's connected digital economy
Well, digital revolution means there are different, 20 years ago there were calls to the hotel, there were visitors to the hotel, there were direct sales that a hotel management team would do. Now we have distribution channels, you know, we have direct bookings through the hotel websites. We have bookings through the intermediaries. And we have various options to capitalise on this new digital era. And the speed of decision making is much faster than it was before. I mean we have mobile applications for bookings, everyone has a smart phone now these days in the developed world, you know, almost everyone is using their smart phone for different things, not only for texting and calling. So we have 14 applications to book to all our brands in different languages, including Russian, Turkish, Hebrew, Arabic, French. And these applications, the revenue from mobile bookings has delivered 600 million dollars in 2013, I think so, 600 million dollars just bookings made through the mobile apps. That’s a great story because I mean you see we didn’t have that five years ago. We didn’t have that ten years ago. So what we’re seeing now is the speed of development of those channels unknown before. And the hotel groups, the brands must adapt to it. And we have launched our Russian website. We’re working on a Turkish website. We know what our guests want to see, how our guests want to make their decisions, because this is what I said, we need to think of our guests at the core of all our decisions.
There are more great videos about the connected digital economy and related issues on the Hospitality Channel.