Innovation in the Hotel Industry: Beyond Technology

Innovation in the Hotel Industry

Albert BarraAugust 13, 2018 · 2 min read

THE IDEA

Innovation is essential to improving and positioning hotel businesses. It goes beyond technology to include processes, marketing and organisational practices. Service quality remains the most valuable and difficult element to replicate. Effective internal communication and the involvement of every team member are key to improving products, managing costs and delivering personalised guest experiences.

The concept of innovation has become something of a mantra that everyone repeats as a lifeline in the face of the stagnation we are experiencing. And it is true that innovation is a fundamental tool for improving our prospects for growth and positioning, but it is also true that the term is used so freely that it is losing its substance and becoming a cliché. There is also a tendency to equate innovation with technology, as though business models, management processes or marketing could not themselves be subjects of innovation—often with a far greater impact than that generated by technical innovations. The Oslo Manual identifies four types of innovation: product, process, marketing and organisational innovation. As we can see, regardless of whether we agree with this classification today, the technological element becomes somewhat diluted among more distinctly strategic approaches. This does not mean that it is unimportant, since it can sometimes be key as a driver of other, more profound changes; however, it is true that remaining focused solely on technology does not help us transform our hotel organisations in a positive way. The hotel sector is fundamentally people-intensive, one in which knowledge and information are raw materials that must flow properly throughout the organisation. Developing purely mechanistic service approaches seriously undermines the quality of our offering and homogenises it, reducing opportunities to differentiate our proposition and eroding our competitive advantage. In other words, what is truly relevant and difficult to replicate is the quality of our service: building a team with a strong sense of identification with the organisation, substantial expertise, and an internal communication system that brings together every part of that organisation. From that point onwards, innovation will become a natural element of our management, because we will be able to develop ongoing brainstorming strategies, channels for sharing ideas, and continuous improvement initiatives involving every stakeholder in the company… What will enable us to maintain a highly qualified team aligned with our model is to improve our product, manage our costs more effectively, and provide a personalised response to every guest—thereby genuinely moving closer to that other mantra repeated time and again: we do not sell products; we sell experiences.

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Innovation in the Hotel Industry

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