Running a hotel is a non-stop operation. With no down time there is very little opportunity to take a step back to look at how things are working and to look for ways to improve and to innovate.

Here are five reasons why innovation is important and how you can achieve it even during a pandemic.

Every hospitality business will be keen to find ways to maintain and indeed improve the guest experience at their hotel, resort, park, stadium or restaurant. And with the raft of new technologies flooding the hospitality market, it can be difficult to know which ones to employ and how much to invest. It may therefore come as a surprise to hear that some of the most effective ways to improve the guest experience need not be expensive or indeed difficult to implement.

When I am on vacation with my family, my focus as a guest isn’t the check-in or check-out and it isn’t in-room technology either.

That’s because 90% of my waking hours on vacation are spent outside my room.

So why is there so much focus on the check-in/out process and the in-room technology if guests spend most of their time elsewhere?

The Disney MagicBand is an amazing concept and has been wildly successful according to all reports. They have reportedly manufactured over 29 million of their bands in the last 5 years and have even created a thriving community of collectors. It has garnered a great deal of acceptance by the visitors themselves and has contributed considerably to a more efficient (and therefore also better for the visitor) operation of the park itself. It has become an integrated part of the visitor experience and can also be used at the airport to get a transfer as well as to open the guest’s hotel door.

Up until quite recently, most technology in hotels and resorts was aimed at the ‘management’ of the site.

Nowadays however, most technology is being aimed at the guest – for the benefit of the guest and to be used by the guest. And that has required a radical change in the way hoteliers choose technologies for their resort or hotel.

I’ve been going to hotels for over 25 years in a professional capacity and there’s something fundamental I’d like to change.