As resorts get ready for the summer, technology is both a competitive asset and a source of unwelcome complexity.
Making it as easy as possible for guests to spend their money must be a key goal. Whether sporting the finest golf attire or simply a pair of Speedos, guests should be able to spend freely wherever and whenever, said Simon Kaye, chief operating officer, Hospitality Technology Advisory.
“The distributed EPOS ensures that any member of a group, family, or general guests staying under a specific reservation can easily allocate spend across the resort to their account. This might include purchases at the poolside bar, paddleboarding, hiring tennis rackets, or extra golf balls on the range,” he said. “Guests won't have to constantly retrieve their cards; if everything is charged to the room, it feels much freer and encourages people to spend more.”
Inevitably, resort businesses are organized across a series of separate departments (golf, spa, F&B, meetings, etc.) but the guest doesn’t experience the resort like that, explained Bernard Murphy, general manager, The Grove, a 300-acre hotel and resort in Hertfordshire, UK. “The guest goes across your business; she just wants to be able to access everything,” he says. “Anything onsite at The Grove can be billed to the room or they can pay for it there and then – it’s their choice.”
Kaye added: “In a resort setting, guests don’t expect a fully itemized VAT receipt. The POS might only accept Apple Pay and not chip and pin, or vice versa.”
Fritton Lake is a holiday retreat and private members’ club within a 1,000-acre rewilding project in Norfolk, UK. Accommodation includes boutique rooms in the central Clubhouse, farm cottages, and woodland cabins.
When Warren Browning joined as the general manager seven months ago, he found several issues with the technology, including a property management system and EPOS that were not talking to each other, so customers were not able to charge payments to their accounts. This has now been fixed.
Wi-Fi versus 5G
Unlike city hotels, the connectivity infrastructure required in a resort can be like that of a village or a small town. At Fritton Lake, some of the holiday cabins are more than a mile away from the main clubhouse.
Browning said: “Several of our cabins are privately owned and some owners have installed their own Wi-Fi. However, we plan to install a blanket service across the site to deliver the best guest experience.”
Depending on a resort’s location, 5G networks have now improved so much that Wi-Fi may not even be necessary. Kaye described Wi-Fi as an “outdated technology” that is “expensive to deploy,” and arguably only vital at hotels with an international guest mix.
He explained: “It is essential to recap the reason why good Wi-Fi is necessary: to support international guests, as roaming charges can be prohibitive. Even low-speed access over a wide area is better than the service provided by some international e-sims.”
At The Grove, Murphy said: “Out in the wilds of the golf course, 4G and 5G are plenty good enough for people, to be perfectly honest. But we make sure we’ve got really good Wi-Fi where guests congregate in numbers. We have a big Ofsted-registered creche and we’ve got a pool area and a beach inside a walled garden, which can host 400 people.”
Several times a year a company holding an event or meeting at The Grove will request their own individual Wi-Fi for security reasons. “They don’t want any kind of cyber-attack or corporate espionage while they are discussing confidential future strategies,” said Murphy.
Joined-Up Systems
Resorts offer bookable programs that change with the seasons. This requires flexible tech systems. At Fritton Lake, guests and members can book several classes and activities, including access to a floating sauna on the water.
However, it takes around 10 to 12 clicks to make a booking because the website is “clunky” and has accumulated a series of bolt-ons over time. The task now is to reduce those clicks to around four.
When he joined, Browning discovered Fritton Lake relied on fourteen different tech systems that did not necessarily talk to each other. “However, what I didn’t want to do is suddenly scrap all these systems, because unfortunately there is not a single system that can take care of everything in a multi-faceted business like ours.”
Browning has brought in consultant Simon Kaye and the team at Hospitality Technology Advisory to overhaul the entire tech ecosystem at Fritton Lake.
The Grove is further ahead, having started the process of pooling data from its various operating systems more than two years ago. The resort has been working with Ireckonu, a specialist in middleware solutions that streamline operations and manage customer data.
Murphy says: “From the user journey point of view and being able to increase the level of personalization of our marketing and communications, it's an investment in the future. Before people start unsubscribing from your emails, you really want to try and get ahead of that.”
However, the road to modernization can be bumpy and full of challenges. Murphy says: “We’ve been down a few rabbit holes. We had people who promised to do what Ireckonu are doing now and wasted a lot of time trying to make that happen. That’s not because they’re bad people. They honestly believed they could do it, but when you go to some of the vendors and try and build these integrations and get the data flows, you just can’t do it; it’s really difficult.”
He adds: “For our needs right now, we thought long and hard about going for any sort of middleware solution and my instant reaction was: ‘No. It’s just another layer, another complication, another cost.’ But in the end we just thought, for us, there really is no choice.”
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