The impact of social media and technology within
hotel industry
Goricastanisic, February 16, 2013
Over the past
years, the increase utilization of new technologies and social media has become
an essential aspect impossible to avoid in the current world of work. The
tourism industry is not spared by this trend and especially not the hospitality
one. A lot of recent articles and surveys try to find out the impacts of this
trend on the hotel industry. The article named “The impact of social media and
technology within hotel industry” published by Goricastanisic in February 16,
2013 attempts to sum up all these positive and negative results.
The positive
impacts of new technologies and social media on the hotel industry
The effective
increase of new technologies and social media’s utilization can be seen as an
international window and consequently as incredible opportunities in the hotel
business environment. Indeed, it can be a fantastic tool:
- To romote a hotel. Publicity can be
easily and internationally release. Newsletters can be sent, information can be
share instantaneously and so on.
- Consumers can
share their own experiences, satisfaction, advice and information with
everybody in the world.
- People can
easily register their rooms, discover new hotels, compare price-rooms-facilities
and so on. It is very easy to get every kind of information about everything.
In a nutshell this tool represent a perfect way to save time.
- Create real
competitive advantage.
The negative
impacts of new technologies and social media on the hotel industry
Unfortunately, new
technologies and social media not only bring positive impacts. They are not
necessarily tools easy to put in place and to manage in an optimal way. As
said before, they represent a kind of international window which can be
dangerous if its management is not perfect. Negative reviews or bad comments on
Facebook or Trip Advisor may turn out to be a real disaster. To avoid these
terrible issues, it seems more and more necessary to implement specific teams
to manage and work exclusively on that.
There are still a
lot of hotels which are not integrating new technology in their strategic plan.
These hotels are generally the small or old ones because of a lack of money or
technological skills. To be really effective, additional employee training
seems necessarily.
Moreover, the
management of these tools is doubly difficult to do properly because targets are
various and it is difficult, even impossible to touch each segment with the
same strategy. How to attract business travelers as well as the leisure
travelers, the young and the seniors and so on? A lot of different platform
should be put in place in order to touch and satisfy everybody.
To conclude, we
can say that new technologies and social media are efficient tools if their
management are absolutely perfect. Their advantages are huge, famous and
considerable but can be turning out disaster very quickly. In the future, we
can suppose that each hotel will have its own team specially dedicated to the
management of new technologies and social media.
Key words: New Technologies, Social Medias, Hotel industry, Positive impacts, Negative impacts,
Other articles:
M,, Christou ,E,, Gretzel, U. (2012) Social
Media in Travel, Tourism and Hospitality: Theory, Practice and Cases, UK,
Asghate Publishing Limited
Solenne Annoussamy and Juliette Courty-Garnier
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