What does the future of the hospitality industry look like? Here’s a roadmap

Business models in the hospitality as well as the food and beverage industry are changing with rapidly evolving technological offerings within the industry.

Hotels and restaurants are now offering services that customers never thought they would see coming from the likes of these entities.  

Tim Brown, vice president of global sales engineering for the Oracle Food and Beverage Business Unit, says that this is because of changing needs after the pandemic, which has seen customers expecting different from their service providers. He was speaking at the Micros Hospitality Tech Connect for 2022, held at the Adapt IT campus, that informed attendees on what the future of hospitality and food and beverage holds.

The ghost/dark/cloud kitchen

It seems like food delivery apps that gained momentum during the pandemic have created a monster: an increased demand for food delivery, increasing by the order.

As such, some restaurants and hotels have had to introduce ghost kitchens, which took off in South Africa in 2020. This is a secondary kitchen set-up – outside that of the main restaurant – generally in a low rent, low traffic area where efficiency can be optimised.

ALSO READ: Flying Dish kitchen: Kotas and wings straight to your door

Brown explained that it was sort of a private but commercial kitchen – an expansion of the original – but purely for delivery services and at a reduced cost of what it would actually cost to expand on the original.

According to Brown, the distinction between traditional restaurants verticals is blurring as businesses venture out into multiple sales channels in an effort to bolster their revenues, with the aid of technology to do this.

The ability to run these ghost kitchens in collaboration with the main kitchen is done through various systems on the market.

One platform that aids main kitchen and ghost kitchens is called Simphony POS. The Simphony POS enables businesses to process online payments, integrate with food delivery applications and optimise stock levels on one platform.

At the same time, these point-of-sale systems are profile the customer, keep track of their purchases, their preferences and provides the seller with valuable analytics around their purchasing habits.

e-Gifting an actual holiday

This week, the hospitality sector also saw the launch of an e-gifting platform designed to help companies in the hospitality industry increase direct and repeat business and acquire new customers. With this platform, the customer can buy a voucher for a hotel stay and gift it to someone.

ALSO READ: SA hospitality industry looks forward to a booked and busy holiday season

It is called Isipo. The new platform is developed by CPR Vision Management and will go live later this year on Black Friday. Speaking at the launch this week, Cameron Richards, CEO of CPR Vision Management, highlighted the many ways that e-gifting vouchers could be used to open up new income streams for the industry, and build recurring direct income.

He cited the example of one client which was able to sell $6 million-worth of vouchers during lockdown for later redemption, something that kept the business afloat.

“With Isipo, vouchers can be merchant-specific, which means that the money goes direct to the establishment concerned, and the flexible platform allows users to develop new ways of attracting new and repeat business,” he said. “This is a purely Web-based platform, so it’s ridiculously easy to implement and use.”

New hotel-stay concepts for the future

Currently, a number of hotels use a platform called Opera from Oracle for their general operations such as handling reservations, checking guests in and out, assigning rooms, managing room inventory, accommodating in-house guest needs, and performing accounting and billing functions.

But Oliver Menzel, from Oracle HGBU Middle East and Africa, providing an Opera Cloud Hospitality Roadmap of what can be expected from the platform in the next 12 months, introduced concepts such as Time Increment Selling, Bed Management and Attribute Based Selling.

ALSO READ: Tips to make hotel stays more pleasant

Ready to share sleeping space with complete strangers?

While Time Increment Selling is more or less self-explanatory and not entirely a new concept (although it does have new, less shady attributes to it), the idea of Bed Management and Attribute Based Selling seemed a bit arb and far-fetched in terms of what a hotel may offer.

The concept of a Bed Management System is generally reserved for hospitals and the idea of sleeping in a bed in a shared space during a layover for example does not really seem extremely appealing. But it is becoming a far more affordable option, and if people can do it at their worst (health-wise), it seems they might be willing to do it at their best – health-wise. Whether it will catch on is yet to be seen.  

Create the type of room you want

Meanwhile, Attribute Based Selling makes ordering a room like ordering a pizza – where one gets to choose their toppings. Customers will soon be able to pick attributes they desire in a room such as a kitchenette, an espresso machine, ocean views, or a room on a higher floor. These rooms can be ‘created’ where possible in line with these requirements. It is a fairly novel concept and one far more appealing than bed management. But of course, it will be priced accordingly.

The future looks bright for the hospitality and food and beverage industry in South Africa, as its starts to pick up the pace after the pandemic. According to Stats SA, income from accommodation increased by 140% in July 2022, the result of a 116.6% increase in the number of stay unit nights sold and a 10.8% increase in the average income per stay unit night sold.

No doubt it is an ideal time for those in the industry to experiment with their way of doing business and reinvent themselves.