As we all know, globalization brings both opportunities and challenges for the world economy, including the hotel industry. Hotels have to innovate and make changes to survive fierce competitions. After doing some research work, I think there are five growing trends in hotel industry.
1.OTA MAY BRING REFORMATION TO THE ONLINE RESERVATION SYSTEM
Nowadays, OTA is a good choice if you want to arrange something ahead of your trip, such as making hotel reservations. It is likely that OTA will have some influence on the online reservations of hotels.
As the leading figure of OTA, Ctrip keeps expanding its layout. It builds a development platform based on air tickets, hotels and vacations and launch projects like ‘self-service traveling in hotels and tourist attractions’ to promote business development. Ctrip accelerated to expand overseas markets and seize outbound tourism market after purchasing Travelfusion, an British company which works at supplying cheap air tickets for their guests. Besides, Big Hotels has established strategic cooperation with Alibaba Group and Shiji Information Technology, aiming at developing PMS (Property Management System) of hotels and fostering O2O system.
With the dilemma that interest space is compressed, the reformation of online reservation system is very likely to happen in the future.
2.SMART HOTELS
‘Smart hotels’ means that hotels should be equipped with an excellent intelligent system, and provide hotel digital information services. With the development of network coverage, especially the Wifi coverage, smart hotels have entered the era of mobile internet.
When it comes to development models of smart hotels, there are usually two main types. Some hotels are independent, while some prefer to cooperate with others. Huazhu Group is the former. It researched and developed a system that helped you to check in by yourself independently, succeeding in reducing the time from 3 minutes to 25 seconds. Chatinn is the opposite one. It cooperated with social media like Wechat. If you are a guest of Chatinn, you can check in by Wechat. What’s more, you can also open the door, call room service and pay your bill by Wechat.
Since technology is not very mature now, smart hotels need a big investment of time and money at the beginning. However, in the long run, fast development of technology will make ‘smart hotels’ a helpful way to save cost and make more profits.
3.HEALTHY HOTELS
Hotels can not be separated from health. Almost every hotel brand in the world is taking measures to combine health with guest experience. For instance, Hyatt bought Miraval in January, 2017. Miraval is focusing on health resorts and hydrotherapy. Hyatt did this to attract potential guests with a sense of health. Inter Continental Hotels Group announced a health-centered brand in 2012, and the first hotel, Even, opened in June, 2014.
Brian Povinelli, leader of Westin, said that healthy tourism had increased by 14 percent in the past 2 years, and it would increase by 17 percent in the following 5 years. Furthermore, the Millennials are becoming main part of consumers, and 60 percent of them view health as the most important thing in life. 41 percent of people who were born after 1998 are willing to pay for healthier products and lifestyle experience.
It can be seen that there is a great demand for healthy hotels. There are many hotels are on their way to be healthier. What is important is that health does not just mean gym or SPA, it should consider all possible factors, including food, mood, sleep and sports.
4.GREEN HOTELS
As the environmental crisis is becoming more and more severe, we human beings are faced with ecological problems, energy problems, population problems and many other series of problems. All these problems will do harm to our present living qualities and sustainable development. Being business enterprises, hotels have responsibilities to do whatever they can do to ease this situation.
Jean-Michel Cousteau Fiji Islands Resorts is one of the ecology-efficient hotels that I know.It was evaluated as the most environmentally friendly hotel in the world by Trip Advisor in 2007.All the architectures are made from local nature materials.They build a waste water system withcoconuts and recycled bottles topurify water, and then inject them to the bay.It is the only one hotel that would hire marine experts and organize activities to spread knowledge about oceanic ecology protection to their guests.
What we have to know is that hotels greening is consist of management greening, operation greening, guest consumption greening, engineering greening and so on. More concretely, hotels should make every effort to minimize energy consumption and pollution to the environment.
5.EXPERIENCE
In the past few years, Airbnb has become a threat to hotels. It snatches revenue and profit from hotel industry. An recent report by the Hotel Association indicated that hotels lost about 450 millions every year under the challenge of Airbnb. Now it’s necessary to learn something from the opponent.
Eventbrite did a research and the result showed that most people preferred to pay for unique experience, instead of products. In response, Airbnb launched tourist experience function in November, 2016. Travelers and landlords can explore the undetected tourist spots and take part in activities to win unique tourist experience. In this completely new mode around experience, locations are crucial for the reason that users seek for all the local things, not just the house they rent.
Generally speaking, hotels pay more attention to providing high-quality room service than promoting nearby tour activities. To achieve the goal of economical growth, hotels tend to imitate Airbnb and make different guests have various experience more easily.