A positive Annual Hotel Conference 2022 puts levelling up on the agenda
LEADING lights from Europe’s hotel sector gathered in Manchester for two days of engaging debate and invaluable networking opportunities.
The Annual Hotel Conference (AHC) priority agenda point for 2022 was to help the industry navigate ‘choppy waters’ caused by inflation, supply chain issues, staffing, and other challenges.
More than 1,000 hoteliers, owners, investors, developers, operators, designers, and suppliers attended the Manchester Central convention complex in the heart of one of the UK’s biggest cities. The programme for the event was designed to help hospitality businesses ‘chart the course’ through current difficulties facing the sector. Sessions, featuring more than 90 industry-leading speakers and delivered as keynotes, panel discussions and one-to-ones, covered pertinent topics.
One unmissable keynote session was presented by Hotel Cloud and Amazon, demonstrating their ground-breaking product and how they deliver the future of hotel revenue management. Focusing on combing three core decision areas, optimised rate setting, targeted marketing for delivering low demand periods and voice activated smart rooms, with a specific focus on howl hotels can achieve lower energy consumption.
Navigating Choppy Waters has become daily life in the world of a hotelier. What has become clear is that the industry is having to incessantly revaluate, adjust and revolutionise to circumnavigate the uncertainty, hence this year’s Annual Hotel Conference programme has been extremely interesting and invaluable for hoteliers.
Real-estate investors stated they have identified the opportunities and have a greater amount of capital to deploy in the hotel sector. However, increased building costs meant they were moving away from development in towns and cities that could benefit.
In some regions areas, local authorities are now taking an interventionist role, partnering with private sector specialists to support the delivery of new hotel stock on a standalone basis of as part of a mixed-use scheme. As increased building costs meant real-estate investors were moving away from development in towns and cities that could benefit.
As the government’s Levelling-up agenda moves forward, there are increasing opportunities for both hotel developers and local authorities to boost communities through hotel creation.
Hotels are seen as a real symbol of urban generation. They can have a positive impact on promoting a destination and showing it’s open for business, attracting office occupiers and new residents, and of course tourists, while being able to hire locally and provide jobs, sourcing locally.
Technology is an area of the industry that is showing the greatest and most accelerated development, both in terms of technology the hotel uses and technology the guest uses before, during, and after their stay. Digital media and the unhalting march of technology means the way you present your hotel business and get people interested will need to revolve around online activities.
Voice technology: With the amount of data in the world, voice search is another aspect with the potential to narrow things down. Amazon’s voice assistant in partnership with Hotel Cloud is now in hotels, from chains to vacation rentals. The system can be customised to include key guest information, like checkout time or pool hours; allows guests to request services like housekeeping or room service; and can be configured to control “smart” hotel room functions, like adjusting the thermostat, controlling the TV and entertainment systems, or raising the blinds.
By improving the in-room experience with the use of the new “Voice” platform provided by Hotel Cloud, which we see as a defining piece in any hotel ecosystem it enables hoteliers to further increase their customer lifetime value.
Using Hotel Cloud advanced machine learning techniques, the technology is able to provide the right recommendations to the right guests, increasing satisfaction, reducing staff time and increasing upsell revenue opportunities.
Additionally, the voice solution can offer efficiency gains for housekeeping and maintenance staff, by allowing complete request tracking and pushing of updates straight from Alexa to the property management system.
Since the global pandemic, the hospitality industry has been working towards a ‘new normal’, but the feeling of familiarity remains vague.
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