28 – HITEC 2019 Special Edition

Suite Spot: A Hotel Marketing Podcast

In this special edition episode of Suite Spot, Host Ryan Embree is joined by the head of Travel Media Group’s product and development team, Jason Lee, to share his key takeaways from the recent HITEC 2019 conference in Minneapolis. Ryan and Jason talk about all the hospitality tech innovations that were shared at the conference including Alexa for Hospitality and different AI systems. Jason also shares his ideas for what’s next for technology in the hotel industry and what that means for hoteliers moving forward. Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot where hoteliers check in and we check out what's trending in hotel marketing. I'm your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone. Welcome to a special edition of the Suite Spot. I'm your host, Ryan Embree. And today's episode we are going to be doing a recap of HITEC 2019 Minneapolis, which I had the pleasure to attend with our Vice President of Product Development Jason Lee who's here to share some notes and thoughts with us about the conference itself. Now, Jason, you are the veteran of these types of conferences you've been multiple times, so just want to get some maybe initial thoughts on this year's conference and comparison to years past. Jason Lee: Yeah, I think, you know, a lot of these conferences have themes, you know, and our theme for sure this year I think even from the keynote on was making things easier on the guest and booking, and research in-stay, post-stay. Um, but frictionless technology in the travel space where that always hasn't been the case in terms of the kind of technology the hotels deliver or hotel companies deliver to guests. So I think that that definitely was the theme this year in my opinion. Or maybe that's just what I came away with in years past. I think there had been other types of AI or machine learning or these kinds of themes where we are now, that might be a little more commonplace. And, and you know, it's really more about how do you apply these technologies to help guests have a better experience or an experience that they're not feeling like, I'm, I'm using tech. They're just, it's frictionless, you know, it's easy. So, um, and I think that is the next step. That's the, that's the evolution that the hotel industry has to take, especially as we're, you know, starting to sunset legacy technology and booking and legacy GDS tech that is probably, you know, the, I think you're starting to see a lot more, uh, advanced technology happening, uh, at the ground level work guests interact with hotel availability. Ryan Embree: Customers are looking for that frictionless experience because they're seeing that and experiencing that, um, in every other aspect of their life. So, you know, the hotel industry as a whole has the reputation for kind of lagging behind on some of these technologies. So when a customer walks in and still has to fill out maybe a breakfast form hanging on the outside of their door, you know, that's not the same sort of frictionless technology that they're experiencing on a daily basis and every other aspect of their lives. So the, the customer's expectations are starting to rise. Do you, do you think the hotel industry can keep up? Why do you think they lag so far behind? Jason Lee: It's always about moving parts. I think that's all technology. It's about how do you, how do you satisfy the demands of privacy, the demands of security, to the maybe the expectations of revenue from a hotel. I want this kind of revenue, or I want this, I want guests to interact with me this way. And before you got into, or we've gotten into the mobile when where people are doing so much more. And I think even in the last couple of years, the statistics in terms of bookings continue to rise.