The client

A hotel owner/operator intending to expand through management contracts.

What did Hotel Solutions Partnership achieve for the client?

Key members of the Board attended a meeting at which the IT strategy recommendations were presented. The CEO subsequently requested two further meetings with the consultant. The client’s leadership had been highly motivated and engaged by the team’s openness as well as the comprehensiveness of the recommendations tabled.

Background

Over the years the client had created a technology organisation that lacked leadership and included personnel with limited hospitality experience. By challenging itself to grow through management contracts, the business needed I.T. to reform or risk limiting overall strategic ambitions and hotel expansion.

HSP associate Mike Wrigley had been mentoring the management of the IT team including: assessing back and front office systems, developing plans for upgrades, replacements to technology infrastructure and assessing what to leave as parent company infrastructure and what to create as a platform for international growth.

The mentoring was so successful that the business leadership asked Hotel Solutions to propose an over-arching strategy for I.T. for the future management company.

Consultants: Mike Wrigley, Ian Graham, Peter Fitzgerald

Methodology

The team first established assumptions in respect of competitors, customers and owners. Expectations of owners from a management company were explored. A competitive landscape was described that identified the applications to address the key processes and compared the client’s position to its future competitors. The technology landscape embraced operations, distribution, guest facing, accounting and control as well as administrative applications and processes. A SWOT analysis suggested that while the client had a core of the right elements in place, the client fell short in its IT leadership and team as well as in implementing a consistent strategy.

The consultants developed a set of critical success factors and from this a list of mandatory systems which the management company would expect to find at a future managed hotel. Another list of highly recommended systems was prepared as was a catch all list of non-strategic IT assets.

This led to implementation recommendations which started with organisation, people and brand issues, IT governance issues, and then addressed each of the mandatory systems. There were further recommendations in respect of the future hosted environment, wide area network provider and the requirement to provide IT technical services to developers and owners.