ICT Boost for Hospitality

Nextgen Technologies For Hospitality event centered on the benefits of ICT that the sector can leverage

When the benefits of ICT has percolated to all industries under the sun, hospitality can never be an exception. In fact, this is the industry that has the maximum scope to use ICT blending it with human emotions. And the industry is growing and will always be an evergrowing business. To meet the growing demand, hotels and properties worldwide are deploying top-of-the-line products to offer digital services for better hotel management and customer service.

India currently has over 200,000 hotel rooms spread across 9,200 hotel of various categories such as starred, economy, and heritage, and guest-houses and is still facing a shortfall of over 100,000 rooms.

The country is witnessing an unprecedented growth in hotel constructions and will be adding almost 114,000 hotel guest rooms to its inventory over the next 5 years. In terms of revenues, hospitality sector did business worth 51,889 crore in 2011 and expects an investment of

40,463 crore by the year 2015. And one has to gear up with respect to next-gen technologies right at the beginning.

Keeping that scenario in mind and to brainstorm over the strategies to tap the massive demand in this sector, VOICE&DATA organized a panel discussion with focus on the scope of next-gen technologies in the hospitality sector.

The workshop that saw the presence of eminent personalities from the sector even probed into the matter that how next-gen technologies help in meeting customer satisfaction and increasing employee productivity at the same time in the era of convergence. Focus was also on technologies that helps in better automation of business processes and workflow management in the hospitality sector.

The objective of the conference has been to get leading CIOs, technology heads, and IT managers to share their experiences with latest and innovative technologies which can improve customer satisfaction in a converged scenario.

Pravin Prashant, editor, VOICE&DATA, in his address talked about the potential of the domestic tourists as the per-capita income of these tourists have been rising over the years, which has lowered the interdependence of the Indian hotel industry on foreign tourists.

Since technology is constantly evolving and updating, the 256 Mbps broadband has now been upgraded to 556 Mbps broadband, which can transfer data at high speeds by making them perfect for HD video and TV streaming, the editor said.

He further added that the 256 Mbps broadband speed has allowed the hoteliers