Do you remember how the Information Superhighway promised a lot back in the late 90s? Every word ever written, every picture ever painted, every song ever recorded could be accessed instantly, anytime, anywhere – and it really all came down to computers, network speed and databases. Computers would all talk to each other through integrations and common protocols and information would be exchanged easily over global networks. This was the dawn of the internet, dial up connections with slow speeds, message boards, AOL, oh file downloads that took hours at 256k a minute – but back then, this all seemed amazing and magic and the evolution over 25 years has been nothing but remarkable. For the hospitality/travel industry this meant we would be able to connect multiple in-house systems like telephones and TVs to central guest solution over TCP/IP, Ethernet or midrange Token Ring networks.
As the internet matured, we saw the dotcom era emerge – a bulk of companies that investors jumped on in 2000 that drove the industry to be overheated and fraught with fraud, and the excitement and froth was hiding the fact these companies had no earnings, which ultimately crashed the NASDAQ and public confidence in technology companies for a decade. However, from the ashes of the collapse sprang new and even better technology companies, both at the consumer and enterprise levels. IBM, SAP Siebel and Sun Microsystems gave way to Microsoft, Apple and the ever-growing Oracle which snapped up these companies to build their technology footprint centered around the relational database and early cloud computing, making Larry Ellison and Bill Gates wealthy and famous people. These solutions would help companies, and even governments, to digitize information into these new database centric solutions. Not wanting to be left behind, the hospitality industry took advantage of these “powerful” computing platforms to start automating everything from reservations, front desk and accounting operations, guest management and supply chain. Websites were going to be the new channel whereby hotels would automate reservations and compete for business, going from static information experience to actually generating revenue.
READ THE FULL ARTICLE BY MICHAEL CARUSO IN THE 2022 SPRING EDITION OF GAMING & LEISURE MAGAZINE.