Hospitality Technology Solutions for Luxury Hotels in Middle East

Middle East hotel industry is set to witness another round of growth in the next few years. Major international events like Expo 2020 and 2022 FIFA World Cup are slated to attract increase tourist.

Prominent cities like Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Riyadh, Jeddah and Muscat are leading the race in terms of attracting international luxury hotel brands setting up their properties. Market statistics say that Middle East region has an oversupply of luxury hotels with around 54, 000 rooms under construction. There are also nearly 720,000 high-end hotel rooms in the pipeline over next couple of years.

According to 2014 HVS report, the total pipeline of branded rooms scheduled to open between 2014 and 2018 will increase the total room inventory by 57% across all five major markets including UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Oman.

City and region-wise peak into growth figures

• Dubai has around 10, 000 hotel rooms under construction and less than 1000 of those rooms are under mid-scale or economy segment
• Abu Dhabi has 22,500 hotel rooms currently
• Doha is looking forward to add another 4000 more rooms in 2015. There will be a 25% increase in hotel room supply in next 3-4 years in Doha
• Riyadh too has done well in terms of adding new hotel rooms to its current supply. Over 5,500 rooms are under development and almost all of them are in luxury hotel segment
• Jeddah will add around 1,400 rooms in 2015
• Muscat’s room supply will increase to double by 2018. Currently, there are 990 hotel rooms under development in Muscat

Luxury hotels are designed with numerous food and beverage outlets, extensive meeting and banqueting space, wellness facilities or other facilities with many other lavish amenities. Thus construction of a high-end hotel in Middle East region will no doubt cost a huge fortune. Keeping this higher development cost in mind, hoteliers need to work on their business strategy in order to generate maximum revenues.

How Can Luxury Hotels Leverage Technology for Premium Service

Hoteliers need to streamline operations with maximum automation, and for this, they need to adopt a smart and all-inclusive large hotel property management software or Hotel ERP. An integrated Hotel ERP is a single, comprehensive solution. It should come with maximum number of in-built modules. This will enable users to manage and monitor department-wise operations easily. The key benefit of a Hotel ERP is to free staff from mundane data entry, enhance guest service, better manage hotel operations, grow room occupancy and thus profitability. Today data safety is becoming a key issue; a PCI DSS certified hotel software is thus a must.

Reaching out to increasing potential guests

As running costs are high, luxury hotel needs to do everything possible to attract more guests to their property. An online reputation management solution, a large distribution bouquet will help hotels connect with a growing customer base.

Ensuring guests find the hotel online

Travelers do extensive online research before booking a hotel. You need to ensure that you are there on all the online platforms so that your potential guests find you easily. In this case, a channel manager can do wonders. With a robust channel manager in place, your hotel staff can distribute inventory to a large number of channels and ensure maximum visibility for your hotel.

Get more direct bookings through your brand website

Incorporate a web booking engine and turn your hotel’s website into a source of generating direct bookings. Many trends suggest that majority of guests feel secure booking their stay on a hotel’s website.

Maintain your online reputation

Having a guest review app integrated into your Hotel ERP enables luxury hotels to collect guest feedback and use these for marketing.

Effective revenue management

A smart revenue management solution enables hotels to better understand guest behavior patterns, track market trends and develop strong pricing strategies to increase profitability. Have real-time availability into occupancy levels, room rates

Ensuring occupancy is at the core of hotel’s back-end operations. Today, hoteliers are leveraging technology to ensure they are constantly updated on occupancy related statistics. A real time dashboard or mobile app that gives this information periodically is the need of the hour. It enables a General Manager to act to reduce rates, give last-minute discounts and attract more guests to the hotel.

Leverage IDS Next’s Hospitality Solution

With 12 modules and many user-friendly features, IDS Next’s FortuneNEXT 6i Hotel ERP is designed for the needs of large hotel properties. Additionally, the ERP is integrated to a unique solution set called Hotel 360. Through this, users of the FortuneNEXT 6i enterprise class solution can easily access online reputation management, revenue manager, business analytics, channel manager, central reservation system, web booking engine and more as a smart way to grow room occupancy.

Debi Prasad Sarangi handles Corporate Communications at Ids Next Business Solutions, a global leader in the domain of hospitality technology solutions.