Wilko Weber wants to make a bet with you: that within a couple of years, some outside disruptors will develop a blockchain-based solution to a problem the hospitality industry hasn’t figured out that it has – and then charge hotel companies a hefty sum to participate. Yep, just like the OTAs did.
“I don’t think we should ask ourselves whether we should use blockchain… We as an industry should wake up and realize that the technology innovation will disrupt our industry again,” says Weber, partner at Swiss Hospitality Solutions AG in Meggen, Switzerland. But he is concerned that hotels are missing the boat. To that end, he says, hotels should be asking a few critical questions to leverage the technology.
Number one, of course, is understanding the potential of blockchain, a digital distributed ledger or database that records transactions from multiple computers and has a strong security selling point. The next questions: “How could I use it for my business to make guests more happy and to make more money? It’s just as simple as that. Then you stumble across a couple of things of how you could use it.”
For instance, Weber says, you could use blockchain as the basis of a decentralized workforce management system; or to create digital IDs that allow guests to bypass the traditional registration and identification processes of check-in and access their guest room immediately.
Won’t all this require an enormous investment of people, business intelligence and resources?
“I think it’s a shift. I know that many hotel companies are debating investing more and more in IT systems. But if I look into overall workforce distribution, I see most of the resources are still running around bringing food to tables, cleaning rooms or preparing food. And I see very little headcount in IT or innovation or these kinds of value-add things. I think it’s always a question of investing, but I think it’s a question of shifting the resources we have at this stage. Because we have more than sufficient resources, it’s just stupid how we allocate them.”
Weber advises looking for innovations in blockchain and the cryptocurrencies that depend on it in the financial technology sector; the first wave of use in hospitality, he reckons, will probably be in payment. “The second wave will be, I think, identification, and the third wave will be distribution,” he says. “Someone will build applications that guests are using, and then we will run behind that and say, please can we jump on your platform because I want that guest. But I don’t think the motivation will be, let’s be disruptive and do something with technology.”
Short of taking Weber up on his bet, how much forward movement does he think the hotel industry will make on blockchain technology in the coming year? “In most industries, I would say even in six months it would be different. In our industry, I would say call again in three years. I think one year is not enough to wake us up.”