A study published in the International Hospitality Review shared that the tourism and leisure industry is moving towards adopting contactless technology. These changes are due to companies now seeing a trend that most customers are willing to revisit innovative properties. Digital transformation is indeed changing and reshaping how different industries work.
How Covid-19 Affected Leisure and Hospitality Industry?
In a report by the United Nations World Tourism Organization, in 2020 international tourists’ arrival is down by 20% to 30% in 2020 versus the same period in 2019. The unprecedented travel restrictions have disrupted operations for numerous chains around the world. Businesses of all sizes faced serious challenges. Most affected are those in the tourism, aviation, leisure, and hospitality industries.
Following border closures, travel bans, and quarantine measures, workers are unable to carry out their jobs adding more problems to the struggling industry. In fact, the World Travel & Tourism Council also shared that the COVID-19 pandemic may lead to a cut of 50 million jobs in the tourism and travel sector worldwide.
These rapid changes have also evolved customers’ preferences. It forced traditional leisure and hospitality brands to explore news to encourage more customers to visit their properties. Adapting contactless technology is one of these unique changes.
What Is Contactless Guest Experience?
Contactless technology is the perfect solution to ensuring customers have a great experience in any type of property. In addition, it is also a future-proof technology. The contactless guest experience uses technology that allows customers to get in touch wirelessly. It reduces face-to-face interaction for transactions like check-ins and check-outs, payments, bookings and more.
Implementing Contactless Technology
- Contactless check-in & check-out – Upon arrival hotels and resorts can utilize contactless technology to welcome guests into the property. An application, barcodes, and purposely built software can be very useful for this. Upon checking out, guests can review charges and complete final payments with a single tap using a device strategically placed in the property or through an application.
- Amenity access – Getting into resort amenities like the beach or pool can be easily achieved using smart devices. As a result, the leisure and hospitality sectors enable guests to have complete control over their sites while ensuring social distancing.
- Improve customer experience – Contactless technology allows guests to have total control of their stay. For example, they can check-in or out late, choose their room preferences, and even add extra to their stay.
- Customized customer loyalty – Innovative technology allows hotels and resorts to push loyalty and rewards in real-time.
Benefits of Contactless Technology
Utilizing innovative contactless solutions means your business is concerned with customer comfort and safety. This is crucial especially in an industry that is struggling during the worldwide pandemic.
Contactless technology minimizes interactions (and possible transmission of diseases) in three main areas:
- employee to employee
- employee to customer
- customer to customer
Contactless technology gain popularity thanks to a range of benefits for both businesses and their customers.
- facilitation of staff daily tasks becomes automated;
- real-time management statistics and analytics delivery is improved;
- support of management operations because less difficult;
- records of customers personal data get better protection;
- increased revenue;
- enhanced control levels and security measures;
- maintenance of safe distancing between employees and customers.
Conclusion
Most sectors around the world have been hit hard economically due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The hospitality industry has suffered its toughest years on record. It is arguably the industry that is having the most difficulty in enacting COVID-19 safety protocols. Therefore, implementing new and smart technology should provide changes to the industry.
Using technology such as rugged devices are part of the daily operations will help improve customer experience. Get to know the best-rugged devices by Conker used in numerous properties and hotel chains around the world here. Conker offers rugged devices that feature 2D barcode scanners which support a range of contactless technology applications.
