Mobility and Mobile Solutions: Way Forward for African Hotel Industry

Like any other technology platform, mobile technology has also impacted the hotel industry world-wide. Hotels across Africa too have understood growing prominence of mobile solutions and have been taking concrete steps towards integrating the same into their daily work process.

The mobile story in Africa

A recently concluded Ericsson Mobility Report shows that there were around 910 million mobile subscribers in Africa by the Q1 of 2015. The survey has also expects that African continent will witness a 70% smartphone penetration by 2020. The reason can be attributed the availability of affordable smartphones. In addition to this, access of internet via mobile phone in the continent is expected to grow 20-fold by 2019/2020.

Impact of mobile technology on hotel industry

Today, due to its wide spread usage, technology plays a major role in hotel business and its operations. A well-researched and appropriate implementation of mobile technology can help hoteliers witness enhanced guest engagement, improved guest satisfaction and increased guest spending.

Hotels operating in a competitive market like Africa can leverage smart and advanced mobile technology to interact and reach out to new and potential customers. Mobile technology is also a key platform for hoteliers in Africa to communicate with prospective guests while promoting their services. Mobile technology is getting traction in the hospitality business as most of the mobile phone users are increasingly accessing internet via their devices. The growth rate of mobile phones and mobility technology provides enormous opportunity to hoteliers reduce the gap between them and their customers.

For guests/travelers, mobile technology does wonders. Empowered with internet enabled smartphones, a traveler prefers to ‘go mobile’ in every aspect of his/her travel plan. Right from selecting a hotel by reading guest reviews to checking out room photographs and booking, everything can be done with a mobile phone. Plus, many hotels in Africa have embraced the mobile technology to enable their guests select and check-in to their preferred rooms prior to their arrival. Many African travelers are increasingly using their smart phones to book hotels on the go.

Globally, more than one in every four hotel booking happens through mobile devices. The same trend is catching up in Africa, too. Looking at the proliferation of mobile phones, hotels across the continent should work hard and adopt mobility apps to increase bookings and enhance occupancy.

Mobility solutions from IDS Next

As a global hospitality technology solutions provider, IDS Next aims to empower hotels across Africa with smart and new age mobile technology solutions. That’s why; IDS Next hotel software (Hotel PMS) users can now access two apps – Easy Check-in and Easy Dine.

Easy Check-in

Downloadable on a smartphone or on a tablet, this app helps your staff check-in your guests to their rooms at the earliest. With this app in place, you don’t have to make your weary guests wait at your front desk to fill in registration details. You staff can simply walk them to their rooms and can key-in their details on the smartphone/tablet. This smart check-in mobile app is the ultimate tool for guests to bypass time consuming front desk formalities. Also, with this hotel mobile application, you can identify return guests by their pictures and provide them a personalized experience at your hotel.

Easy Dine

Easy Dine is yet another mobile app from IDS Next that has all necessary features to help you serve your diners quite efficiently at your in-house restaurants and F&B outlets. With Easy Dine, your steward logs orders directly into the mobile, while sending out a KOT without moving away from the guests table. This does away with errors that occur when noting on paper. Easy Dine has been designed to ensure your hotel staff pays more attention to the needs of your diners, enhance efficiency, better manage service and wow your guests. This obviously has a positive impact on your revenue too.

On guest facing aspect, Easy Dine takes your restaurant operations to the next level. It enables diners to view food items by recipe, image, video, recipe description, ingredients and more. Guests can customize their food by selecting predefined modifiers. For example, this feature helps your diner to let you know if he or she wishes to include or avoid certain ingredients. This app can also be quite useful for diners as they can send special notes or instructions to the chef while placing their order. For example, if a guest wants his curry less spicy, he or she can instruct the chef about the same.