HOSPITALITY INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND STRATEGY

Hospitality Information Technology and Strategy

Hospitality Information Technology and Strategy

Introduction

IT has undergone dynamic and rapid development. Such change is driven from two sides. On the supply side, new technologies are emerging fast, whilst the business environment increasingly demands more IT support. There are two well-established frameworks concerned with the development of IT in organisations. Both of these provide insights into the ways in which IT is evolving, offering management the possibility to exploit this complex phenomenon, without going into the technical details.

Some researchers have proposed a model describing the growth processes and the development of the use of IT in organisations composed of two eras, namely the Data Processing (DP) era and the IT era. This model by adding the Network era. Each era has its own characteristics in both business and IT terms. The transition from the DP to the IT era is typified by a technological discontinuity while between the IT and the Network era an organisational discontinuity can appear(Law 2005).

In the same vein, it has been posited a similar framework, which outlines four main eras in IT adoption and use, that he calls the System-Centric, the PC-Centric, the Network-Centric and the Content-Centric eras.

The descriptions and analyses of the different eras, proposed by these two frameworks, suggest that they have considerable overlap. What follows is a necessarily simplified overview of the evolution of IT use, within the context of TVU hotel reservations and its implementation(Law 2006).

Reservation method in TVU HOTEL

The reservation function is of paramount importance in any hotel, since an efficient reservation approach leads to high occupancy rates and successful sales efforts. During the last few years, the hotel sector in the U.K. has been in deep recession; however, with the forecast improvement in business, an identification of the importance attached by various categories of establishment to any of the available reservation methods is of great practical relevance to this industry.

In principle, there are five major ways for hoteliers to receive customers' requests for rooms: customers may telephone, telex, fax, write letters, use computers or visit the hotel reservation centre. After the hotel's reservation clerk receives customer requests for rooms, they need to check their room availability. If there is space available, the clerk may enter details of the booking on their reservation form. Then, the reservation clerk may distribute the reservation form to other departments in the hotel, e.g. the restaurant, in order to prepare the necessary food or other facilities(K.N. Lau 2001).

Overbooking policy

This is a practice of accepting more reservations than there is space available. It is one of the popular methods available for TVU hoteliers to maximize their room occupancy for two major reasons. Firstly, TVU hoteliers often face the problem of customers who fail for any reason to honour their room reservation. Secondly, TVU hotel inventories are perishable in the sense that, if they are not sold on a given day, that business is lost forever. It is possible to overbook a TVU hotel without ...