Hospitality Technology in India: Need to Up The Ante

Technology in the hospitality industry globally has grown monumentally in terms of its application accuracy and features, be it at the back-end or the front office operations. Leading indigenous hospitality technology providers share their insights on the demand and supply of smart technology in the domestic hospitality market which however, still remains in the nascent stage, with a fair share of the market still remaining untouched by tech

- Akshay Nayak

With the increasing use of smartphones since the past 10 years and worldwide penetration of internet, the modern-day tech-savvy travellers, especially the millennials, are well aware of most of the technologies across the spectrum of diverse applications. In fact, tech-driven services have become the need of the hour for them. Looking at this demand, travel tech didn't take much time to become a prospering segment, with numerous startups mushrooming in this space; providing vivid first-of-their-kind services. Be it booking a ticket online, issuing e-visa, or planning a whole itinerary of their upcoming trip, many startups pumped in millions of monies from investors. A KPMG FICCI report titled 'Expedition 3.0: Travel and hospitality gone digital' also reads that the travel and hospitality sector is rapidly evolving with the rising adoption of various tools, technologies, and digital platforms - primarily to improve customer experience, build strong loyalties and run businesses efficiently. These include mobile applications, social media, Big Data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR).

The global hospitality industry as a whole also has embraced growth with some revolutionary technological advancements. The boom of hotel metasearch engines, OTAs, in-room mobile accessible technology, chatbots, online review/ testimonials pages, etc., make it all evident that the hospitality industry is also striving to cater to the modern-day travellers with seamless and memorable stay experiences. The trend which initially was predominant in the western countries has inreasingly become evident in Asia as well for the reason that the tech-savvy millennial traveller market is booming in this continent.