Hospitality Information Technology Strategy

1. Hotel utilise e- commerce very effectively for procurement purpose. They purchase essential products necessary for the daily running of the hotel via online websites. I would like consider Costa coffee Heathrow in my case study as I am working there presently and it is very much suitable for this case study. The website which Costa uses to purchase its essential products for daily running of the business are: * www. geometric-furniture. co. uk * www. kn-portal. com * www. caterwide. com * www. incorporatewear. com * www. coffeecreation. co. uk * www. bunzlcatering. o. uk Geometric furniture – Geometric Furniture is a design led manufacturer of high quality contract furniture. Established over 40 years ago, Geometric has become one of the UK’s leading contract furniture suppliers. It supplies to number of company like Odeon cinema, Costa Coffee, Oxo Tower, The Warehouse, Ronald Mc Donald house. The best thing about this company is that they deliver they service by the mselves, inform their client beforehand about its features. Delivered the product on time without fail and do understand the important of deadline and reliability.Kuehne + Nagel – has got a new contract to manage the distribution of food supply on behalf of Whitbread plc, which is the UK’s largest hotel and restaurant group. Costa has taken the decision to fully outsource its food logistics activities to Kuehne + Nagel because they agreed to undertake delivery of chilled and ambient products to over 700 Costa Coffee outlets seven days per week, and delivery of frozen, chilled and ambient products. The contract is for 5 years and in addition with that Kuehne + Nagel will operate a customer call centre on behalf of Whitbread and manage the ordering of products from designated suppliers.Caterwide – As one of the UK's largest and fastest growing coffee shop brands, Costa Coffee has been using Torex Inn Touch POS and Caterwide for the past ten years to drive strategi c initiatives around cash management, suggested ordering, stock control, labour management and reporting and business processes. One of the key advantages of the Torex solution is that it integrates with Costa Coffee's loyalty programme, the Costa Coffee Club, whereby customers can collect points when they buy food and drink which can be redeemed against future purchases.Incorporatewear – Incorporatewear, the UK’s premier corporate clothing provider, has been percolating a piece of new business over the past 12 months and is now delighted to pour out the details of its recently signed contract to supply Costa Coffee. Incorporatewear only work with the highest quality materials and the Costa range is no different with shirts and aprons being manufactured from premium poly/cotton fabrics and provides the uniforms for 16,000 Baristas and staff. There are two companies of Whitbread plc which are under the umbrella of incorporatewear that Costa coffee and premier inn.The be nefits of it are, advanced call centre telephone system, dedicated client contact number, instant query resolution, experienced team. Bunzl catering supply – is the upcoming leading distributor of non- food consumable to hospitality and catering sector in the UK, it got 10 branches all over the UK provide a responsive and a flexible local service. at each branch they got dedicated customer service team which has good understanding of local business need and provide outstanding customer care from points of order through delivery.We can place order through telephone, fax, email and online as well which include an image catalogue, fast orders, regular buys, and saved basket. when the order has been placed the following information is readily available to them: full customer details including delivery address previous purchase history authorised product list real time stock availability pack sizes and product descriptions Coffee creation (prima coffee service ltd) – has be en supplying high quality coffee product from more than 12 years with a passion for quality and attention to details.It’s very easy to place an order with coffee creation; it takes you through each step, finding the item you would like to buy, add the item to your shopping basket, proceeding to checkout, sigh in, enter your details, check and submit your order, provide payment information, get email as the confirmation, tracking down the order. Sometimes they send product for sampling if requested and the customer of coffee creation are cafe Nero, Costa coffee, coffee republic. 2. Critically evaluate your organisation’s website. Discuss its strong and weak points. How user friendly is it?Is it functionality adequate? Put yourself In place of someone who is unfamiliar with the organization. Does it enhance the reputation and encourage further contact? Webpage are the most inexpensive and the most effective way to promote any business especially in coffee shops people ar e looking for new shops in their neighbourhood and while travelling often start their search on internet. More than half of the marketing job is done if completely describing your cafe on webpage. The website of Costa coffee is quite eye appealing and attractive to customers.It matches the same colours and fonts on their web site as they do in their cafe. By using just the 2,3 colours, consistent fonts and easy navigation it stimulates the cafe itself. Some basic thing which a webpage must have it are, location, opening hours, photo gallery, about the business, menu, and press release. Out of all this Costa coffee explains its business, update press release, latest picture of the product, location of all the stores with opening and closing hours, address 5. What is social media? Identify three different types of social media how they can be of benefit for hotel industry.Social Media is the use of internet-based programs to make interaction with friends, family, classmates, customers and clients. It can be done for social purposes, business purposes or both. The appropriate way to define social media is to split it into two parts, social and media. Media is a tool of communication, like a newspaper or a radio, so social media would be a social tool of communication. This social tool of communication doesn’t just give the information but interact with you while giving that information.Interaction may be like asking you for to comment in any particular thing, or letting you vote on any article or asking you to rate any movie etc. Social media is a new form of interacting people that allows anyone to become a source of information through new technologies that doesn’t need any previous experience. It also allows the audience to be the author and author to be the audience. Anyone can experience the interaction for free as long as they have internet connection. The popular site of social media includes Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Flickr and many others .These sites all allow users to post information that can then be commented on, followed or enjoyed by larger social groups and peers. Many Hotels are investing on its use to target market demographic groups or to break through to new potential customers. Now Days mostly all the hotel have Facebook pages and are adding facebookers as friends in an effort to attract new customers and build brand loyalty. There are restaurants that are tweeting out daily specials and/or coupons to give as a gift to their followers.Facebook- one of the most popular of social networking sites which allows users to sign up and add friends and social groups, post information, comment on that information, post photos and become fans of various items or company or group. Hotels create their facebook page to add their customer, to target new market, they post photos of the some special event occurred in hotel and tag their friends (customer), by tagging photo a friend of friends, who is known to the hotel ca n get to know about the hotel and his or her friend whereabouts.Through this hotel make new customer with the help of Facebook. Example – some Marriott hotels use their Facebook pages to communicate with guests about local and hotel events. (USA Today) Twitter: This is a free social networking and micro blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author's profile page and delivered to the author's subscribers who are known as followers. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow open access. Elmore 2010) Twitter also allows hotel employees to start conversations with guests; even a tweet as simple as â€Å"Hope you're enjoying your stay! † which give a personalized touch that some guests really appreciate that. Hyatt and Hilton hotels are using Twitter as a virtual concierge service to which guests can â€Å"tweetâ₠¬  queries and expect responses within the hour. (USA Today) Youtube : A very popular and free video-sharing  Web site  that allows registered users to upload and share their video clips online at the YouTube. om Web site. To view the videos you are not required to register but to upload the video you need to register with your email accounts. It allows billions of people to browse, watch and share originally-created videos. It creates a group of people to connect, inform, and inspire others across the globe and acts as a distribution platform. The Marriot Resort & Stellaris Casino in Puerto Rico uses YouTube to let guests record a 30-second video postcard to send to friends and family through the resort’s YouTube channel.A hotel can use the youtube to promote their own website by sharing and uploading videos of own hotel. 6. What is cloud Computing and explain how it can be used for the hospitality industry? The service provided on internet with the use of computing res ources (hardware and software) are called as cloud computing. All data that is being accessed are usually saved in servers, which are in accessible by any unauthorized user. This allows enterprise to maintain faster service and less maintenance from IT.Technology has advanced rapidly in the last couple of years that now it is possible for almost any device to quickly connect with a cloud service and access the information required. The â€Å"cloud computing† concept minimizes the upfront cost of infrastructure and allows the enterprise focus on project, which will differentiate the business itself rather than the infrastructure which will be avoided. Many author have made the attempt to describe it, Buyya et al. efined it as a â€Å"cloud is a parallel and distributed computing system consisting of a collection of inter-connected and virtualised computer that are dynamically provisioned and presented as one or more unified computing resources based on a service level agreeme nts established through negotiation between the service provider and consumer. † The key characteristic of cloud computing are: (1) illusion of non ending computing resources, (2) with the use cloud computers up- front commitment is eliminated, (3) ability to pay for use as needed, (4) self service interface and (5) resources that are virtualised.The concept of Cloud computing had benefited the hospitality industry in many ways, such as: A hotel can eliminate the large upfront costs from acquiring computational assets and the typical time delay in building out and developing computer software app. By eliminating upfront cost hotel can save its precious capital to take future business decisions. It allows user to access system through web browser from anywhere at any time, user can access through any device, like pc, laptops, mobile etc. with the use of internet.It improve the business performance and the service delivery, the maintenance cost of cloud computing is very low. So me other benefits which a hotel can get from cloud computing includes low upfront costs, minimal IT infrastructures and easy access across multiple properties. Cloud has a pay-as-you-go service requires minimal investment and offers better technology at a lower cost. 1. Social media 2. 0 Successful social media programs that have value meld top technology and sales best practices By Gina LaVecchia Ragone 2. Social Media & the Hospitality Industry by Forest Time, Demand Media . M. Miller, Cloud Computing: Web-based applications that change the way you work and collaborate online, Que, 2008. 4. R. Buyya, C. S. Yeo, and S Venugopal, Market-oriented cloud computing: Vision, hype, and reality for delivering IT services as computing utilities, in Proceedings of the 10th IEEE International Conference on High Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC 2008, IEEE CS Press, Los Alamitos, CA, USA), Dalian, China, September 2527, 2008. 5. Khan, K. M. , & Malluhi, Q. (2010). Establishing tru st in cloud computing. IT Professional Magazine, 12(5), 20-27.