Looking ahead to what’s next for the hospitality industry

I’ve attended the Newmarket Customer Conference before and always enjoyed it.  This one was bigger and better than ever, with a great line-up of speakers from within Amadeus, from some of their key business partners and their customers.  Always the customers.  Lee Horgan’s (CEO) kick off was a real eye-opener and a great start at establishing a shared vision with customers and business partners for what hospitality from Amadeus is going to become.

I had a great time participating as moderator of a general session panel, talking to users of each of the main product portfolios within Amadeus:  the well-known Sales & Catering family, the equally-established Service Optimization products and the PMS and CRS units, coming on strong.  The title of the session was “Visions to Realities” and that is what we talked about:  How these five users of core products use the systems and more importantly, the relationships, to drive their businesses and turn the visions to realities.  The panel was an all-star line-up and they just killed the topic, each and every one!  My thanks to:

• Nick Price, citizenM Hotels, speaking about bringing the PMS product live. He gave great insights on how cloud technologies drive the need for scale.
• Keith Credendino, IHG, on the CRS under joint development with Amadeus. He somehow gave a vivid explanation of the ROI behind investing in a new CRS… without using a single number!
• Scott Campbell, Caesar’s Entertainment, on the Sales & Catering product line. Scott shared a compelling story of how a structured training and implementation cycle at the new Atlantic City convention facility got the new sales team up, running and selling in less than two weeks.
• Jennifer Green, Hyatt Hotels, addressing Service Optimization (what we used to call HotSOS). She articulated marvellously the need for change management, planning for change and communications.
• Stefan Lorch, Starwood Hotels & Resorts, talking about his experiences with Service Optimization Housekeeping (what we used to call REX). He explained about the need to tell a persuasive story to get owners and managers to buy into technology investments, especially for something they haven’t needed to buy before.

Probably my favorite part of the conversation was when we talked about the all-too-common problem of too many stores of guest profiles, creating conflicting pictures of who our guests really are.  A great panel, and they made my job really easy.

So, a great event, and really well-produced by Amadeus.  It takes a ton of work to pull off a conference like this one and they did a great job.