Speaking in Anaheim at last week’s Hospitality Financial & Technology Professionals annual HITEC conference, I was joined by friend and twice former colleague Mike Robinson, head of product architecture for InterContinental Hotels Group. Our topic? The impact of Web 2.0 technologies on the hotel industry. Given that Web 2.0 is now nearing its fifth birthday, we decided to vary a bit from the program and add in our view of what Web 3.0 might look like.
Expecting a technically diverse audience with backgrounds ranging from technology vendors to hotel operations and marketing personnel, the basic objective of the presentation was to give the group a primer on how key web technology has advanced, the benefits provided and an overview of some emerging technologies that serve as the foundation for Web 3.0. Not to get too academic, we also wanted to to provide some examples of practical applications of these technologies and how the organizations deploying them are differentiating themselves from their competitors.
Amazing Advancements in Web Technologies - Now if we can only get the hospitality industry to use them...
One somewhat startling observation – when I was surveying a number of leading industry figures for recommendations of web sites where hospitality companies were
effectively utilizing Web 2.0 technologies, the most frequent response was something close to “none come immediately to mind…” This is a rather painful statement to hear repeatedly, particularly within an industry that claims to be constantly seeking creative methods to showcase product benefits and more effectively engage with its customer base. The good news is that there is ample room for improvement – as organizations update, there are opportunities for strategy to be reassessed and new tools to be deployed. continue reading →
