Fragmentation has long been a challenge for the hotel industry. Multiple solutions, complex integrations, and scattered data has made it difficult for properties to track their business accurately, let alone their guests. In this blog, we’ll take a look at the evolution of hospitality integrations and how early software has inspired the latest innovations shaping the industry today.

All in One Systems

In the 90’s, monolithic applications dominated the hotel tech landscape. The PMS was the “must have” operating system that was then installed in a physical server on-premise. PMS companies positioned themselves as “all-in-one” solution providers since the software contained functionality for each staff member to use. For example:

 

• Engineering had a simple way to track work orders.
• Front Desk checked guests in and out and managed their folios.
• Accounting tracked invoices, sent statements, and processed travel agent commissions.
• Housekeeping scheduled daily task sheets and tracked progress throughout the day.
• Reservations agents sold and modified reservations for call-in guests as well as email/fax requests.

Integrations weren’t in high demand because everything already came “in the box”.

The Era of Interfaces

Most hotels had “Property Interfaces”. These are connections between the PMS and on property solutions like the Phone System, Key System, and Video OnDemand. This type of data exchange still exists today, albeit it has undergone some improvements. For example, contrary to the distant past, property interfaces today are exchanging data more through IP-based protocols rather than serial (cabled).

As the 90’s slowly faded out into Y2K, along came “Integrations”. This marked the beginning of the end for the All-in-One PMS.

In the early 2000’s, companies began to capitalize on internet-based application connectivity.

These XML and SOAP integrations not only enabled structured exchange of reservation, profile and availability data between solutions, it also introduced a way to manage it all in one place. A capability that hadn’t existed to that point and led to further inclusion of IT into Hotel Operations.

Companies commercialized the integrations as add-on licenses in the PMS. Next, tools and user interfaces were created to allow hotels and hotel groups to configure and monitor each integration from a central point.

Enterprise Application Integration (EAI)

It typically requires some degree of middle-ware on at least one side of the integration to manage and direct the message traffic, invoke services and do the message queuing.

This benefited hoteliers for a while, but can partially be blamed for introducing the fabled problem of fragmentation into the industry in the first place.

In hindsight, this approach to exchanging information limited cooperation and coordination amongst tech vendors. Vendor Integration Certifications can be an expensive and lengthy process, putting our shared customers, hotels, in the middle of it all — making them suffer.

Their suffering ultimately affects the guest; whose experience we are all trying to elevate.

What other ways was Fragmentation introduced?

Once the challenges and hurdles related to attaining a vendor certification were overcome, other issues surfaced that caused further fragmentation.

In order to be effective, these integrations required two or more databases to be synchronized.

The data is [unnecessarily] duplicated.

Apart from the inherent increase in risk associated with storing the same data in multiple locations, it’s also not very efficient.

If you’re on a hotel’s revenue strategy team, think about all the extra time you might spend manually reconciling and auditing the PMS and CRS systems to ensure they’re in sync, it really becomes an eye-opening problem.

Let’s say you want to publish a promotion across your entire estate of 1,000 hotels on a Tuesday, by Friday you’re likely still putting out the last fires related to rate discrepancies. This is because keeping a PMS and CRS in precise, real-time synchronization…is nearly impossible.

The data being exchanged and modified is driving your hotel’s e-commerce strategies; ensuring this critical data is up to date and accurate in BOTH systems was destined to be agonizing.

This problem needs to be addressed through modern integration approaches.

Welcome in, SOA and Microservices.

These two similar but distinct methodologies for integrating solutions has ushered in a ton of change and innovation in the hotel industry for the past 5–8 years. A wonderfully clear explanation of Microservices can be found here, at Swaggerhub.com.

Microservices is a style of application architecture that calls for developers and engineers to build applications in a more de-centralized way.

Think of it like a pizza buffet. The chef doesn’t bring out pizzas topped with everything to the buffet table. The chef instead, creates individually topped pizzas and lays them out for consumption. This way, each individual can pick and choose what they want.

Creating the “All-In-One Pizza” isn’t efficient because some people will have to pick off the mushrooms and jalapenos.

So creating applications where the business features are independently modular and loosely coupled together, allows them to be more agile and useful when integrating to other systems.

What are the benefits?

If having an “asset-light footprint” is a trending strategy for the largest hotel companies in the world, so may be a “data-light footprint” trend emerging in hotel tech.

The benefits of Microservices:

(1) Data stored in fewer locations, lowering overall Cost and Risk.

(2) It makes upgrading software easier and less inter-dependent. (think Netflix — have you ever seen the site go down for maintenance?)

(3) It speeds up the delivery of new product features.

SOA and Microservices frameworks could enable tech suppliers to drop synchronization altogether and form much tighter bonds through web-oriented API integrations, as long as the tech supplier’s architecture and commercial rules allow for it.

This catches us up to the current state of integrations in the hotel tech landscape today. A mixture of all of the above described integration frameworks and methodologies exist today, with the latter taking a stronger foothold — ushering in a new wave of inter-operability.

Several interesting projects are underway to help bridge the fragmentation gap amongst hotel solution suppliers. HTNG has a dedicated work group called the API Registry work group. They’ll be releasing a white paper later this year but the premise is that first and foremost, we need a directory. A quasi-technical catalog of sorts made available online so that tech suppliers, and to some degree technical hoteliers, can get a handle on what’s available and how to communicate with systems.

Our friends at HotelTechReport.com also have an initiative that compliments what HTNG aims to provide through their work group. They are cataloging hotel integrations into one place online for hoteliers to research products, read reviews and generally see what applications connect to systems of their own.

Amadeus Hospitality has a vision to be at the forefront in providing the most modern, scalable set of tools for the hospitality industry through open, cloud-native capabilities and integrations. Reach out to us if you’d like to learn more about our vision for integrations in the hospitality.