The advantage & challenge in IT on Tourism & Hospitality Industry

This is an information era, who mastered the resources, mastered the data, who would be winner. In Tourism & Hospitality Industry, there are four mainly technologies that they are using:

Internet:

This is an amazing door, you can find almost all the information that you want, and as for the Tourism & Hospitality Industry, they can publish their own brands, specific products or pictures on their own website, or even use social media, like facebook, blogs, twiter etc, to promote themselves, also can improve their total revenues.

Reservation Systems:

There are a large amount of the people who reserve tourism products or hotels directly on Internet. With the benefit of IT, Tourism & Hospitality industry can build their own website to let clients reserve directly, or either cooperate with OTAs, like Booking.com, Expedia etc, to get more sales. As for the company, they can use pricing strategy to update the price in all the reservation systems, as for the clients, it’s also easy for them to compare among several companies, to search the one best for them.

Computer Systems:

This technology is mainly for big companies, they have a system to combine all the branches, to integrate all the resources to make the work more efficiency. For example, chain hotels, they need this system to collect and keep all their customers’ information together to do the further data analysis, to build new development strategies.

Mobile Communications:

At the beginning, computer is the main tool for us to do advertisement or marketing. Later, people prefer to use tablet or telephone to search, to do a reservation and to communicate, so nowadays in Tourism & Hospitality Industry, they also have three versions of there website, covering all the potential customers.

Finally, even there are lots of advantages of IT in Tourism & Hospitality, but we have to mention that it’s just an intermediate tool, to link between your company and customers, compared with traditional ways, we can make more benefits, more efficiency with advanced IT. However, we don’t have enough opportunities to communicate with clients face to face or by telephone, to build a trust and a long-term loyalty relationship with them. So in the future, with the development and innovation of IT, we should also pay more attention to build the relationship with our clients.

SHIYI WEI

YUAN ZHANG