Sounding Off: Go modular, or go home, when it comes to tech interfaces

Sebastien Leitner, Cloudbeds

"If you have to learn numerous interfaces, you’ll spend most of your time on the job understanding how to use multiple systems within a fragmented tech stack."

Quote from Sebastien Leitner, vice president of strategic partnerships at Cloudbeds, in a story on PhocusWire this week about tech skills and interfaces in the travel industry. 

Each Friday, PhocusWire dissects and debates an industry trend or new development covered by PhocusWire that week.

Unifying technologies and access across multiple platforms is no easy task.

The industry has developed this way, until recently anyway, over decades as suppliers and software vendors have plugged in the latest ways of doing specific tasks.

Hotels and airlines have arguably seen the most fragmentation when it comes to adding more systems and interfaces into the stack that operates something that appears - to the customer, at least - to be a fairly simply task.

Global distribution connections, reservation systems, customer relationship management tools - each have their own requirements and rules, with different ways of operating them that have different outcomes.

The technical underpinning of the travel industry is not something that is easy to unravel, especially when there are multiple vendors solving often small problems within the overall system.

There are now many vendors that attempt to pull together disparate tools into a single platform - but their achievements in doing so come at a cost, both in terms of financial and the deployment of resources.

The industry can continue to at least hope that systems are built in a modular way (they haven't always been, by any stretch of the imagination) that allow for easy integration when a provider is unable to carry out every task that is required.

This is true no more so than in the present, as the sector embarks on accelerated digitalization that automates many processes and yet still is unsure as to what is likely to come down the pipe (literally, in most cases).