The changes in the hospitality industry were always driven by the changes in consumer behavior and the market. According to the Oracle study, 94% of business travelers and 80% of leisure travelers value the option to request in-room services and message hotel staff via smartphones.
Hotels are always going through changes. To meet the modern customers’ needs and wants, hotels, OTAs, and travel agencies implement cutting edge technologies. Technology-driven innovation in the hospitality industry can help venues delight guests and generate new revenue streams, which is positive for both OTAs and customers.
Here is how the UpStay and apaleo partnership will revolutionize technology innovation in this sector.
Closed Garden Approach: What is It & Why It’s Bad
Software developers for the hotel industry have to think big to be competitive in the markets. At the moment, the hospitality industry turns to all-around solutions. It’s practical – investing in one software keeps development costs at a minimum while enabling hotels to digitize many services.
However, software companies are unable to deliver an all-in-one solution that excels in every area. The result? They deliver mediocre or even sub-par results to hotels. Additionally, although there are thousands of solutions on the market, only a handful encourage integration. That’s what a closed garden approach refers to.
On the opposite side, we have the open-market approach. It allows software companies to specialize in only one area. Thanks to the narrow field of specialization, they can develop cutting-edge software solutions based on emerging technologies. One of these solutions is UpStay, the leading pre-arrival room upgrade solution for hotels.
However, to benefit from the open-market approach, the hospitality industry needs access to an open API – a solution to streamline integration of solutions and enable hotels to build their stacks.
Democratized Access to Innovation for Hotels Worldwide
With access to an open application programming interface (API), accommodation providers can build their toolbox. Open API is bound to challenge the legacy software solutions hotels have been using for over a decade. The legacy software is, for instance, a PMS with a limited number of features, functionality, settings, and integration potential.
Upgrading to a new PMS built on legacy software architecture seems less feasible because there are no guarantees that it will have all the features and functionalities accommodation providers might need in the future. For instance, hotels know that over 70% of travelers value personalized offers. However, such AI and machine learning-powered solutions are too costly to deploy.
They remain out of reach to small and mid-sized establishments. Deployment costs and time-to-market remain two main challenges for innovation through software implementation in this vertical. Solutions, such as apaleo, will forever change this scenario.
Revolutionary PMS With a Strong API
How is a PMS solution such as apaleo going to revolutionize and democratize innovation in the hotel industry? Apaleo PMS is an open-platform PMS with an Open API. What does it mean? It means that it comes with no limits. It resembles the ordinary PMS solution from the outside.
The apaleo PMS has some recognizable features such as inventory management, reservations overview, rate planning, and accounting.
However, it’s what’s under the hood that makes apaleo PMS revolutionary. It supports Open API meaning that you can integrate other specialized software solutions with it, such as channel managers, mobile check-in top point-of-sale, and even pre-arrival room upgrade solutions such as UpStay.
Hotels Can Now Leverage Technology and Innovation
According to the Travel Technology Europe survey, hotels identify access to the right data at the right time as their main challenge. Legacy PMS solutions simply can’t offer a solution because they cannot integrate with specialized solutions to push and pull data on autopilot.
With apaleo PMS, accommodation providers, no matter how big and small, can now truly leverage technology and innovation while cutting costs and minimizing time-to-market. The apaleo solution supports over 20 highly specialized software tools built exclusively for hoteliers.
The Open API democratizes the connectivity and makes it possible to integrate virtually any solution. The best thing about it – accommodation providers can add/remove apps from their stack according to their current establishment’s needs and business goals.
Open API is Becoming the New Standard in Hospitality
It’s early days for the API paradigm in the hospitality industry. It is clear, however, that the industry is moving towards it. There is no other way for hotels and hotel-tech vendors than to follow industries that already use it as a standard. Take the banking industry, for instance, in which adopting the pro-connectivity approach empowered vast innovation and new value for both consumers and banks.
The open banking paradigm is a standard that revolutionized the sector yielding a new class of financial services and products for bank users globally. According to the Open Banking Report 2019, almost 90% of countries worldwide have at least one type of Open APIs in place.
UpStay joins apaleo’s effort to democratize connectivity and facilitate the hospitality industry’s Open API paradigm shift. UpStay connects to the apaleo PMS with the click of one button. It’s truly an example of how easy it should be for hotels to embrace innovation and face the new challenges head-on.
Jonathan is a data science and software engineering wizard. He began his career in the Israeli NSA equivalent elite technology unit 8200, where he led a research and development team in high-performance computing and machine learning. In his last role, Jonathan served as a senior engineer at Gartner Innovation, leading there a core NLP and ML project. Studied Entrepreneurship and Business Administration at IDC Herzliya, Graduated with Honors.
