Contemporary Issues In The Hotel Industry Information Technology Essay

A hotel industry also represents the service profession. In fact, the hotel is like a market where there is demand and supply. It is a place where people stay, eat and visit. However, there are many contemporary issues that happened in the hotel operations. This is the reason why this study is made to find out the problems as well as give recommendations for further improvement in the hotel industry.

Contemporary Issue 1

Salary Gap Between Hotel And Other Industry

In the hotel industry, some organization resisted addressing this in an attempt to lower costs. Founders have focused on the firm’s culture in the process of keeping the industry creative. This is a method to retain and get workers as well as increasing production. The problem which lies here is the thing doesn’t always go the way it is expected. The starting pay is not very high and there are many options for potential employees to seek for elsewhere. In the hotel industry, there are many opportunities of job in different departments. As an example, the human resource department, marketing department, food and beverages department and others. There are many other related opportunities in other industry but this is not the reason for employees to leave. These things are considered to be famous benefits in organizations like Google, but the only difference is the greater salary package. This is where it follows the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Rewards in monetary is a huge motivator for people nowadays in the early stage of career and they need it to establish themselves in terms of financial before able to fit into the role in such an organization.

Contemporary Issue 2

Lack of Systematic Management System

For the hotel industry, this is very common but if it happens together with other issues, then it must be something that needs to be solved. A clear and understood management system is able to give a coherent objective to all the staffs in the organization. If the structures are made properly, all the initiatives and measurements for staffs can be ensured following the goals and objectives of the organization. This is pay-related issue as well because it can lead to a climate of fairness due to the employees being evaluated using the similar criteria. They participate in the evaluation and are done by their supervisors on an informal basis which can be very subjective as it doesn’t help to retain employees.

Contemporary Issue 3

Lack Of Promotion Opportunities

There appear to be an issue with the potential for promotion within the company that limits the opportunities for new employees to progress within the company. The employees who joined in the first year the company was established appeared to have a close relationship amongst themselves and with the founders. As a result, these employees hold the key executive and management positions within the company. This limits the opportunities for new employees to progress within the company.

Contemporary Issue 4

Lack or Poor Quality of Internet Connection

In the hotel industry, there are many lower class hotels which don’t have the internet convenience for their customers. The internet has become such an important part of our lives that many cannot imagine life without it. Every day, millions of users rely on internet to help them navigate through the trillions of websites to locate the website or information they want. Most people who utilize the internet connection in the hotel will basically need the search engine. There are many search engines, but the most popular are Google, Yahoo and MSN Search. Search engines help people locate websites to shop online, to find a destination or to check facts. Academic research has been greatly assisted by the internet for it has enabled vast quantities of information to be obtained effortlessly.

A search engine can be defined as a website that helps users search for information on the World Wide Web (Battelle, 2005). Search results are normally displayed in a list of results that are termed hits. The results yield information in the form of web pages, information, images and other types of files such as Word, Excel, Powerpoint or PDF. Some search engines also mine data provided in open directories or databases. Search engines work when humans enter input which is then processed algorithmically.

While each search engine has its own features and operating system, all conduct searches in the following order – web crawling, indexing and searching (Vise and Malseed, 2005). Information about web pages is stored by search engines. Information is then retrieved by a web crawler or spider, which is an automated web browser that follows every link on the site (Capron, 2006). Contents of each page are then analyzed to determine how they should be indexed and an index database is created for future use in queries. A query is the input typed by the user and it can be as simple as a single word. The index is then activated to permit information to be found in the shortest time.

When a user enters a query into a search engine, such as key words, the engine examines its index and provides a list that best matches the search criteria. The search engine looks for the words or phrases exactly as entered. The list contains a short summary of the document’s title and perhaps parts of the text. The index created from the information stored with the data and the way in which the information is indexed.

How useful a search engine is depends on the relevance of the results it provides. While some key words may yield millions of results (for instance the word “Monday”), the key is to provide a list that is most relevant and useful to the user’s needs. Generally, search engines rank results to provide the most relevant first, though they vary from search engine to search engine. This is why Google has a leading edge because users find the results to be most relevant.

Recommendation

Employee Remuneration

The hotel industry has to develop remuneration policies that improve the staff behavior and also enable the organizations to understand their objectives. The employment of such a practice is for the hotel industry to achieve competitive advantage which can encourage the potential employee behavior for the following reasons:

To promote employees identification with the organization objectives – The hotel industry should keep track on the attention of their employees towards the objectives of the business by relating the achievements of objectives to rewards. Such a step will increase the employees commitments while increase the success rate of the organization. The method to do so can be creating an incentive plan which includes annual bonus and profit sharing. Such method will show the employees that they will be rewarded if they give good performance.

To encourage individual team of business unit performance – The hotel industry should give a different type of scheme such as sales commission and production piece-rates. The reason is to ensure employees can understand they can earn more than what they are getting in their regular salary.

Reward

Schuster and Zingheim (1992) emphasized that “people are the principle variable in organizational success.” The hotel industry should develop process and policies to reward employees based on their contribution, skills and competences. The reward and solution is to improve the employee’s turnover in the hotel industry. It should have an aligned strategic approach with the industry in congruent with their culture. It is also better to have the policies and processes of reward modified according to the changes in the hotel industry. Employees should be valued according to their contribution, skills and competences. Sometimes, employees must be treated as a family in the organization where they can make representations on any area of reward that affects their interest.

Branching Out

For the hotel industry to sustain its competitive advantage, it needs to build on its strengths. These include the company’s reputation and familiarity for users. Hence, companies in the industry should leverage on its brand name. Branching out are ways in which the company diversifies through its brand name. Another major strength of the hotel industry is the customer relationship management and services provided. They need to constantly formulate new ways of improving the industry and spends billions on development. This is crucial to ensure that the company stays ahead of the pack. One constant fear is that a rival that is better will emerge.

Improve The Search Engine

No industry is perfect and the lack or poor quality of internet connection in the hotel industry needs to be solved. For example, the content of searches is arbitrary. The user may not get the information that he is looking for. Also, there is the risk of dead ends. For instance, the user may find the citation to the article or web page, but cannot access the full page (Stross, 2008). This may not be entirely the hotel industry’s fault, but it can be frustrating to users. Furthermore, searches are done by computers and results are obtained mathematically. There is no expert search feature which would enhance the process. The list of search results is based on popularity and not quality. This puts customers at a disadvantage. Finally, Google’s search engine is in English. People who cannot read English (and they number in the billions) cannot use Google and this represents a loss of market share. While Google currently has a language tool that translates text into 35 languages, it may not be of good quality sometimes. If Google could make multilingual versions of its search engine the way Wikipedia does for its online encyclopaedia, the company could prevent loss of users to other search engines that cater to their linguistic abilities.

Cloud Computing

The hotel industry should implement cloud computing. Cloud computing is a recent development and refers to computing through the internet. Currently, computing is computer based as it relies on hardware and software that are stored on a PC (New York Times, 2008). Therefore, cloud computing customers do not own the physical infrastructure and rent it from third party providers. Rental is charged in the manner of utilities or on a subscription basis with few or no upfront charges. This represents tremendous cost savings to businesses which no longer need to incur massive capital expenditure on computer infrastructure. The appeal of cloud computing is that data can be accessed anywhere with internet connection. This is in contrast to the current way in which data is stored on a computer hard drive which does not permit mobile users to access data.

Conclusion

As a conclusion, there are more than the issues mentioned above that happened in the hotel industry. It is an industry that problems cannot be predicted and also changing from time to time. The hotel operation is the key to success and issues that happened must be successfully solved before able to move one step ahead of others in the industry.