In 2008, Prabhash Bhatnagar has an idea to
streamline the organisation of small and medium-sized hotels by starting up his
company Hotelogix. Hotelogix is a
cloud-based solution for hospitality businesses aimed at simplifying many aspects
of a hotel, such as: front desk management; point of sales management;
housekeeping management; and integrated distribution. Furthermore, they provide a solution with a
goal to increase the number of distribution channels used by a hotel, which
should help the hotel to increase their distribution and boost sales.
Based in New Delhi, India, Hotelogix now has
offices in Bangalore and California, USA.
They have also expanded globally places such as: Nigeria, Germany,
Nepal, India, Cambodia, Philippines, Argentina, etc... The companies in the countries mentioned
above have partnered with Hotelogix to sell their services on their
behalf. This means that Hotelogix has
very effectively increased its number of distribution channels and their access
to worldwide markets. It is also
interesting to note that this has all been done in a very short space of time,
as mentioned previously, Hotelogix has only been around since 2008.
Yesterday it was announced on the travel
website Travolution that Hotelogix was urging UK hoteliers to switch to
cloud-based management systems rather than continue using legacy management systems. To teach the UK hotelier market the
advantages of switching to cloud-based technology and more about the Hotelogix
product, the company has decided to organise a series of webinars and offer a
two-week trial of their solutions. In
addition to advantages that cloud-based systems can offer, we believe that UK
hotels should adopt these kind of solutions as forecasts by PwC for 2014
indicate that competition is increasing.
Small and medium hotels have much to gain from moving towards more
cloud-based management.
 |
| Image courtesy of KROMKRATHOG / Freedigitalphotos.net |
There are many advantages that can be linked
to using cloud-computing rather than legacy systems in a hospitality context. In our opinion, one of the main advantages of
using cloud-based management systems is that they can communicate effectively
and easily with travel agencies online.
Generally, legacy systems do not have the required ability to do this,
which we believe to be a major weakness in these systems. Moreover, another important advantage is that
the solutions offered by Hotelogix allow hoteliers to easily manage all their
hotel operations, as these are in constant communication with one another
through the cloud.
There are however some disadvantages to using
cloud-computing. If the systems were to
fail for any reason, data could be lost and/or irretrievable. If such a thing were to happen, this would be
a large loss, especially if it were to happen to a small independent hotel. Furthermore, another weakness lies in the
question of security. How safe is the
data saved in the cloud? Should the
systems be hacked into, sensitive and confidential information could be made
public and used by the wrong people.
Finally, more in-line with Hotelogix’s offer, we believe that a 15-day
free trial is not long enough for a hotel to completely test a new system
out. Considering the steep monthly
prices of the solutions (for 45 rooms, you pay $135/month for the Property
Management System), hoteliers who have never used cloud systems before should
be able to test the systems out for a longer period of time. Otherwise they would need to have someone on
their staff that is adept with cloud-computing software.
In a world where IT and technology is
developing, at first sight this solution appears to be perfect for all
hospitality businesses. In our opinion,
properties should nevertheless consider whether to switch to cloud management
systems or not. As mentioned above,
there are both positive and negative points linked to this change which need to
be weighed against each other carefully.
Alexis & Melanie
No comments:
Post a Comment