I live on the outskirts of the Mobile World Congress city and most of the time when I commute from home to work and vice versa I have no connection or access to almost any mobile network. I can't connect to the corporate repository, or browse, or check social networks. The service is so intermittent and the bandwidth so bad that the best I can do on my commute is read and listen to music. Even so, Barcelona is the mobile capital of the world and that is not in dispute. However, in Africa the cell phone has become the wallet of every citizen, you can even pay and receive money without having a bank account. There is almost no infrastructure, Internet penetration is poor, but the most basic forms of communication have made it possible to pay with the cell phone, collect salaries, lend money, do journalism, share information and chat. And they have been doing this for more than a decade.
At the close of 2014, internet penetration in the world has been colossal. The United States and Europe lead in broadband with 80% and 78% respectively. Even underprivileged regions such as South and Southeast Asia, Africa and Central America have grown and the presence of mobile devices has forced the march of the internet. The digital physiognomy of the world is changing. This has caused the use of social networks to grow exponentially, affecting, in every corner of the planet, the way of doing business. The user has taken control, yes, it is repeated a lot, but most are not aware of what is happening while the old business models are cracking and the new ones are forced to reinvent themselves minute by minute.
It is estimated that there are 5 billion cell phones in operation and that 1008 million of them are smartphones. This means that at least 80% of the world's population has at least one cell phone. Can businesses cope with so much freedom? Do we know how to turn the sheer volume of data that washes over us like a tsunami into information? Do we know where to look? It may seem blunt, but we have barely begun to crawl into the new data economy.
Perhaps, that is why there is an unbridled race towards the Internet of Things (IoT), because no one wants to be left out when the user takes control again, but this time of all appliances, wearables and smart machines that will be part of the universe of cities. But all this is still a long way off. More than worrying about how to control the microwave from the self-driving car and the lights at home to turn on the preferred color when we are in a good mood, there is a lot to be solved.
If you talk to a hotelier about ubiquitous computing, 3D printing, software-defined infrastructure, artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things, he's not going to listen. Not because he doesn't believe in technology, but because his particularities make him very focused on a business that operates at cruising speed and where technology is expected to solve problems, not create them. This has generated a perhaps excessive caution and has caused them not to repudiate technology, but they are not fooled by technology and that makes the sector so pragmatic and to the extreme skeptical. In the tourism industry, to paraphrase Martin Heidegger, the truth of things is constructed by technology, but it is the useful and measured use of that technology that recreates the nature of the experience. Because the essence of technology is to “unhide”, “unveil” and “challenge” by engaging the human being, not alienating and excluding him. But hoteliers know that very well.
Until a few years ago it was not difficult to fill a hotel. In fact, hotels, although they didn't sell themselves out, were not overbooked and overbooking was almost a sport. Tour operators were treated like powerful spoiled brats and were the ones in control. Even the travel agencies kissed their feet. In other words, to make it easier to understand, retailers and tour operators were the main intermediaries for most tourism products. But with the arrival of online agencies (portals) the food chain increased and hoteliers moved further away from good profits and bad numbers made them lose sight of the fact that the world was not only changing with so much technology, but that the client had also changed and with so many interesting offers (charming hotels, gay friendly, boutique hotels, etc.) and so many sales channels, stars and diamonds ceased to be a hallmark and the categorization of the client began to be the hallmark, the obligatory reference and the punishment of many hoteliers.
With the benefits and growth of the hospitality industry, technology was incorporated, but piece by piece, according to the needs of each chain or group. First they automated the rooms very rationally and the electronic key (card) was imposed, but not because it was convenient for the customer, but because it was also used as a switch to turn on the lights, start the air conditioning, refrigerator and TV. Later they introduced management systems to automate processes (PMS) and tools to manage online channels (Channel Manager), put in Wi-Fi (charging at first) and even check-in/out machines, video game consoles and even mobile apps to make online reservations. So if you talk about digital transformation to a hotelier and overwhelm them with the state of business maturity and technical mumbo jumbo, you will come off as an idiot, because the tourism industry has always been transforming digitally. But this digital transformation has been so disorganized, disparate and slow that it has led to an ever-increasing distance between the hotel and the customer.
It may seem contradictory that the hotel is losing the end customer, but it is true. The hotel hosts the tourist, but the pre and post-sales experience is passing, most of the time, through online portals. In some cases, the information that reaches the hotel is only essential and the user's profile, tastes and opinions remain in the portal. If to this we add that with the increase of intermediaries, better positioned on the Internet, the hotel has lost visibility. It is easy to deduce that independent hotels, chains and groups have had to give in to the “extortion” of the strongest intermediaries. To make matters worse, the emergence of tourism Peer to Peer and the rise of apartments are forcing the tourism industry to reinvent itself. How will they be able to overcome all these problems? It won't be with technology alone, but with strategy, and this strategy has to be digital.