Digital impatience: Hotels need to adapt to win the "Need for Speed" generation

Companies like Amazon have made it clear: Everything is accessible to everyone at any time from anywhere. In real time, without delay, on‐demand.

It’s a fully automated, digitized world, where mobile banking apps provide 24/7 accessibility and Netflix offers movies at the push of a button.

And thanks to this growth in e‐commerce and apps, customers expect simplicity, speed and automation in everything they do - not just online, but in all areas of life.

Journalist Peter Glaser has called this impatience "instantness." Meaning, we want to satisfy a current need as soon as possible, preferably at the same moment.

Driven by this “instantness,” transaction‐based, automated processes are increasingly replacing personal interaction, as they are significantly faster and more efficient in some areas.

As such, the hotel industry and meetings and events industry are not spared from the societal expectation for immediate gratification.

Hotel industry threatens to lose the connection 

The hotel industry must finally adapt to the customer's demand for "instantness." Hoteliers know better than anyone that hotel rooms are sold through online channels, so this point is probably not surprising.

Traditional hotel processes are also becoming increasingly automated. Self check‐in and check‐out via smartphone is just one example in the lodging world.

In addition, "digital natives" and Generation Y have grown up in this digital world; they know nothing else, and therefore expect nothing less than 24/7 instant gratification.

Once these generations enter the workforce, their spending power and influence will make them a strategic audience segment and future guest.

Manual booking processes must be automated

Hotels can no longer delay evolving their processes and adapting to today’s technology, including automation.

Hotels, particularly those in the small to mid‐size meetings segment, that do not adapt will likely lose business - and ultimately, revenue - in the near term.

The MICE (meetings, incentives, conferences and events) market has historically been dominated by a manual process or poorly automated platforms, and though most MICE business is booked directly with hotels, there has been a lack of instant book solutions.

Just as travelers don’t want to wait in line at hotel registration to check in or check out, meeting and event planners don’t want to wait hours or days for their requests for proposal (RFP) to be answered - if they get a response at all.

Hotels can no longer delay evolving their processes and adapting to today’s technology.

Felix Undeutsch - head of MICE, Expedia Inc.

Share this quote

In the digital age, conference planners no longer have the time (or desire) to click their way through various cluttered websites and forms, and then ‐ in the best case, after a few hours - compare four to five offers or quotes. Conference prices and availability must be visible at the push of a button, in real time.

Whether for a single hotel, an entire city or several destinations in comparison, real‐time data will replace manual meeting requests for small to medium meetings, and comparing offerings and rates from various hotels and properties will be easier and more transparent for event planners.

But what about hotels? Imagine being able to yield prices for meetings - based on multiple dynamic criteria such as lead time, length of stay and occupancy - to better manage and maximize your meeting and event space and grow MICE revenue.

This is not utopia - it’s possible with Expedia’s MICE online booking engine, which this month started rolling out to select strategic hotel partners in the United States.

Part of Expedia Powered Technology, the white‐label technology solution is a ready‐to‐implement, back‐end software that hotels can integrate into their own websites, allowing meeting and event planners to instantly search, price, configure and book meeting space and group lodging online.

The technology can accelerate and simplify an expensive and historically time‐consuming process, enabling hotels to answer RFPs approximately 20 times faster (according to initial results from a Best Western Hotels Central Europe test period in Germany).

By automating the MICE planning and booking process for smaller meetings, hotel sales managers can focus their time and effort on larger or more complex - and higher-margin - RFPs and help to maximize revenue.

Meeting planners are already changing their booking processes, based on the evolution of automation and technology, and hotels that do not automate and make the process more efficient, will lose business to those that offer a more seamless solution.