How APIs Are Shaping The Hospitality Industry

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Applications Programming Interfaces have been the game-changer in the operations of the hospitality industry. Today, people are able to, for instance, book hotel rooms or order food from the comfort of their homes without any issues. They do not even know how the applications they use when performing these tasks work. Some actually think that all the processes happen right within the application on their phone or their computer.

A developer builds a food ordering application for a certain hotel. Within this application, they need to be able to get the daily menus from the hotel, get available delivery options, get the prices for the meals, and many other things. A single application that has all this information will take a very long time to build. They, therefore, look for other applications to get this information from.

For instance, they use the Google Maps API to get all the available delivery options and an API from the hotel to get daily menus and their prices. They integrate these APIs into their application to ensure that they can get all the information that they need without any problems. This would not be possible without APIs. So, what are APIs?

What Are APIs?

An API (Applications Programming Interface) is the programming interface that makes the above connections possible. Taking an example of a hotel, let us assume that you have visited your favorite hotel and are seated at the table. The entire setup – the system in this case – includes the kitchen, the waiters, and yourself. You need to make an order but cannot access the kitchen. This forces you to use the waiter – the API in this system – to make your order. The waiter informs the kitchen about the order. The kitchen prepares the order and through the waiter, it is delivered to you.

That is how APIs work. They are responsible for the communication and sharing of data between applications within and without a system. They dictate the calls that are made, how they are made, the conventions and data formats used, and the responses returned after the calls. Using APIs, the hospitality industry has been able to come up with innovative solutions that simplify their operations and improve the experience of their customers.

How The Hospitality Industry Use APIs

Business Intelligence Applications

The chances of making any sense from the data collected from a hotel on a daily basis are very minimal without the use of business intelligence solutions. These solutions – powered by APIs – collect data from all the hotel branches, the front office, and the hotel competitors and analyze it offering hotel owners insights into different performance metrics.

Using such insights, hotel owners are able to make the right decisions on their marketing strategies, meals they should add or remove from their menus, and things they should do to streamline their operations. Other tools such as Routier provide hospitality entities with AI operations that enable them to quickly adapt to changes for them to capitalize and capture opportunities in real-time. This has shaped the hospitality industry, all because of APIs.

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Connecting Applications to Hotel Management Systems

Imagine a situation where a guest at a hotel would need to talk to the hotel staff if they wanted to change their rooms or upgrade them. That would be time-consuming, most guests would find the process ineffective, and others would just stay in their current rooms.

However, if the hotel owners connected upgrade applications with their hotel management systems, guests can change their rooms or upgrade them without having to talk to anyone. They would also be able to make payments directly from the systems with ease. These are some of the solutions that the hospitality industry is able to enjoy due to the use of APIs.

Connecting to Revenue Management Systems

Hotel owners are supposed to provide information such as numbers of occupancy to revenue management systems that are tasked with offering pricing recommendations. This would be a very difficult task for them if they were to conduct it manually.

However, APIs have made it possible for hotel owners to integrate their hotel management systems with revenue management systems to automate this process. This makes sure that the price recommendations are accurate and up to date, depending on the data collected from the hotel systems.

In conclusion, technology has had a major impact on customer behavior, especially in the hospitality industry. It has made sure that they (customers) understand the value of good services and provided them with many options to choose from. This means that hotels need to adopt modern technological innovations if they want to meet the demands of their customers.