The Influence Of Technology On Hospitality Firms - Essay Example

The hospitality industry is a very wide and far reaching industry that covers many businesses and people. It has been defined as including hotels, restaurant, and all facilities that provide shelter, food, and other services to people away from home. Hence, there is an appreciation of the grand scale of facilities that are covered within the hospitality industry. This article will assess the role that technology has played in ensuring that this industry has continued to be effectively managed (Barrows & Powers, 2009).

Technology in the Hospitality Industry The hospitality industry has for a long time been slow in adopting technology. Due to its sensitive nature, the hospitality firms have always been more interested in enhancing interpersonal contact with their clients rather than having technology do the same for them (Jones, 2008). The need to ensure that the clients get that personal touch has seen the hospitality industry get the description of being ‘low tech and high touch’. Jones argues that the human interaction has remained of paramount importance in the hospitality industry (Jones, 2008).

However, there has been a move towards the adoption of Information Technology (IT) within this industry. Several benefits can be achieved from the adoption of technology within the hospitality industry. . Additionally, technology can be helpful to employees who deal with clients to customize the whole interaction process (Jones, 2008). This means that the hospitality firm will still be within its paramount goal of enhancing inter-personal contact with the clientele. Conversely, in this case, the technology will come in to enhance the whole experience making it more pleasant to the client.

As a result, this will be helpful in ensuring that the firm gets a return customer. On the other hand, the customers will also benefit from the adoption of technology by the hospitality firm. In essence, they will be in a position to use technology independently to customize service delivery, and his/her delight (Jones, 2008). This means that there are cases when the customer who is known to frequently use the services of a hospitality firm gets to enjoy a form of special treatment whenever they visit the firm.

The Ritz Carlton, for example, has a service, which allows it to handle sudden and unexpected demands of a client. This also includes arranging to have the client’s preferences of food, and other services such as entertainment provided whenever the client has visited the hotel (Jones, 2008). The emergence of the Web 2.0 has been a great influence on the habits of tourists. It has a tremendous amount of influence on the manner that they plan and consume travel related products (Fuchs et al, 2012).

This means that there is a lot of potential to involve the internet in the hospitality industry. A travelling agency can take advantage of this fact to place all its packages online. With different destinations, as well as the costs of each package, a client will go through all this information, and then settle on what they think suits them. All this can easily