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The latest trends in hospitality industry
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Tuesday, 14 December, 2021, 15 : 00 PM [IST]
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Vaibhav Verma
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It’s official: the future is quickly impending. The hospitality industry is changing faster than ever before and it’s nearly impracticable to keep up with all of the hotel, travel and hotel management trends impacting this dynamic business. The hospitality industry is competitive, and businesses need to keep up with the latest hospitality trends to avoid being left behind.
Furthermore, keeping pace with the industry as a whole is a great way to ensure your business delivers the kind of customer experience people want and expect. However, the needs and priorities of customers have also changed due to Covid.
The hospitality industry is diverse and includes everything from hotels and other accommodation types, through to restaurants, bars, travel agents and tour operators. Adopting the latest hospitality trends in response to the changing behaviour of customers, due to the corona pandemic, is essential.
Still, most trends are emerged out of more general changes in consumer behaviour.
Below, you can see a rundown of both general hospitality trends, along with trends that act as a reaction to the corona virus pandemic and related changes in customer behaviour.
Five Hospitality Trends Being Accelerated by Covid
1. Safety & Hygiene
There are a number of hospitality trends that can be broadly described as being related to safety and hygiene and these have become especially important with the emergence of Covid, as the world adjusts to the virus and efforts to contain the spread. It is essential that these concepts are a priority for hotels, restaurants, bars and cafes.
Measures here may include the provision of hand gel, increased cleaning of areas where customers will be, implementing policies related to wearing masks or other protective equipment, and ensuring social distancing rules are respected. Any special rules need to be made clear ahead of time and need to be enforced to make people feel safe.
2. Contactless Payments
Many of the biggest hospitality trends are concerned with reducing friction and contactless payments have been one of the biggest examples of this. When contactless payments are accepted, customers save time on sorting through cash or entering their PIN. The emergence of things like Apple Pay, Whatsapp Pay and Google Pay also remove the need to even carry a wallet.
Aside from removing friction and improving the customer experience, the corona virus pandemic has also increased the demand for contactless payments. Many customers and staff members feel uncomfortable handling cash and providing the option for contactless payments may be seen by many as a necessity rather than a luxury.
3. Voice Search & Voice Control
The use of voice search is becoming increasingly common among customers searching for and booking hotels and restaurants, so you need to respond to this change in behaviour and make a clear attempt to capture these customers. This means, among other things, structuring your website content clearly, so it features properly in voice search results.
Beyond this, voice control can also be used to control devices within hotel rooms, enhancing the guest experience.
For example, smart speakers can provide guests with answers to questions and can also respond to voice requests to turn on lights and devices within the room. This can also reduce the number of surfaces guests touch too.
4. Enhance Food and Beverage Delivery at Home
Many restaurants and establishments offering food have adapted to the Covid situation by increasing food and beverage deliveries, allowing customers to enjoy something akin to the restaurant experience at home. Often, this means accepting telephone and online orders, delivering quickly and offering contactless deliveries.
A key part of hospitality management in the Covid era is finding innovative new ways to impress customers. In terms of food and beverage delivery, bars are exploring ways to bring drinks to customers’ houses, while restaurants are increasingly offering extras, whether that means including candles, free food, or QR codes with Spotify playlists.
Of course, takeaways do produce more waste, so try to use suitable packaging, that can be ethically disposed of.
5. Robots in Hotel & Restaurant Settings
Automation ranks high up on the list of hospitality trends to be aware of and robotics is a good example of this being taken further. Hotels, restaurants and similar businesses can use robots to greet customers and provide customer information, while they can also play a vital role in security operations too.
Within the hotel setting, robots have been used to offer room service and perform cleaning and other housekeeping chores.
Meanwhile, restaurants can potentially use robots to carry out aspects of food service. This can be especially useful when dealing with restaurant customers who are trying to reduce close contact with people as much as possible.
General Upcoming Hospitality Trends
Below are trends based on the way customers behave, new ways of providing hospitality services, or general moves towards adopting new hospitality technology.
Chatbots
Chatbots are another of the major hospitality trends linked with customer service and can be especially useful for delivering swift responses to questions, even when human staff are unavailable. In many cases, this can lead to first contact resolutions, but the chatbot can also gather information and pass it on to a human rep if required.
Those in the hospitality industry need to get to grips with the increased number of questions customers will have about coronavirus and restrictions within accommodation and restaurants too. Chatbots will be able to answer the most fundamental questions in this area within seconds, helping to reduce stress levels for all involved.
Virtual Reality Tours
Virtual reality ranks among the most exciting hospitality technology trends, providing the means for potential hotel guests or restaurant diners to experience what their surroundings will be like, all from the comfort of their own home. This can be crucial for moving these people from the planning stage to actually committing to a visit.
Virtual tour/360 videos can help some customers to better understand the facilities available. Offering this service also gives you a clear edge over any rivals that are not yet capitalising on this particular hospitality trend and the web-based nature of modern VR tours means they should be easily accessible on many devices, even without a VR headset.
Healthy and Organic Food & Drinks
In the past, a substantial section of the hospitality industry was made up of fast-food restaurants and bars selling sugary alcoholic drinks. However, there has been something of a cultural shift, with people becoming more aware of the things they are putting in their bodies, leading to healthy food and drinks trends.
For restaurants, this has meant re-vamping menus with healthier options, including gluten-free, dairy-free, low fat, vegetarian, vegan and organic options. However, the trend for healthy food and drinks extends to hotels, catering services and even holidays as well, with healthier room service options, as well as healthier drinks sold behind bars.
Sustainability
Increasingly, customers are concerned with environmental issues and want to know that the businesses they deal with are behaving ethically. For this reason, sustainability has been one of the most noticeable hospitality trends of recent times, with a growing number of hospitality businesses promoting their eco-friendliness.
Examples of this range from restaurants promoting their vegetarian and vegan options, to hotels that make use of smart light bulbs and smart heating to save energy. Within the accommodation sector, there are also decisions to be made about using more sustainable materials for things like towels and bed sheets.
Smart Hotels
In simple terms, a smart hotel is a hotel that makes use of internet-enabled devices, which are capable of sending data to one another. Smart hotel designs are tied in with the idea of the ‘Internet of Things’ and have emerged as a more popular concept since smart speakers and smart hubs became popular consumer products.
A smart hotel might, for example, allow guests to control the heating or air conditioning from their phone, or turn on the TV by giving a voice command to a smart speaker. In many cases, smart rooms also automatically adjust things like the brightness of light bulbs, or the temperature of a radiator, in order to maintain optimal conditions.
Major technology firms will replace most hotel brands, because they can offer technology solutions and create markets to attract customers. The traditional hospitality industry will evolve into niche markets (serving specific types of customers), or extremely luxury sector (so they can afford to pay their staff a reasonable salary). Those who can't identify their niche will become the money machines for technology companies. Some brands big enough may survive, but their business will get tougher.
(The author is HOD & assistant professor at Banarsidas Chandiwala Institute of Hotel Management & Catering Technology)
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