Hospitality is the reception and hosting of visitors, guests or strangers and offering them catering, entertainment, lodging, transport and other services.
Hospitality is common with hotels and resorts. The hospitality industry works closely with tourism, and it has grown tremendously over time. The growth of the hospitality industry has been majorly due to technology. Technology mostly involves the use of computers and thus information technology.
Information technology was first used in the hospitality industry in 1950s for accounting services. Since then, things have not been the same again, and that was just a foundation of technology in the hospitality. This has benefited hospitality firms with the recent trend being social medias where they can advertise. This essay examines how the employment of information technology in hospitality industry has developed, highlights the role that information technology currently plays within global hospitality firms, and examines present trends and issues as well as tries to guess on the role that this technology will perform in the industry. Firstly, technology has influenced the recording of details in a transaction.
This service is achievable by the use of electronic point of sale system. The electronic point of sale system is used in recording the particulars regarding a business operation (Chon & Yu, 1999). Despite the fact that they are easy to use, they offer completely improved services over the old non-computerized systems, such as comprehensive information regarding the way two items are working in respect to sales amount. Enz (2009) indicates that there is also the price look-up, which enables a client to press a key labeled with the handle of the food or drink, and the accurate cost is added to the transaction.
Additionally, the electronic point of sale system enables the reduction of work for personnel ensuring tht items are not absent from the bill or erroneously charged. It is also simple to attain the sales breakdown by all outlets and the number of workers for every sector. These details, if wisely used, can aid the management of the firm to guarantee utmost efficiency and profitability. Secondly, technology has enabled hospitality firms to improve their food and beverage management systems.
Food and beverage managing system takes the idea of stock managing a step higher (Khosrowpour, 2002). They adjoin a control structure when properly implemented and give a significantly enhanced level of managing control. With this kind of organization, there is the formation of a catalog of all recipes used in the business jointly with an added catalog containing the ingredients used for supporting the dishes.According to Reid & Bojanic (2009), another importance of technology in the hospitality industry is menu engineering. This practice utilizes the central processing unit modeling of data and was first urbanized in the United States of America. This system holds information concerning sales quantity, price and earnings of every kind of food on the menu.
In order to achieve this, a menu is created offering the best possible balance amid popularity and highest profit. Initially, before the emergence of technology, the technique was in use with paper and pencil, but currently it is extremely effective with the utilization of computer system (Reid & Bojanic, 2009). Dietary analysis is another way technology has influenced hospitality firms. Here, the nutritional content of a menu is systematically analyzed. Scores of people are mindful regarding what they eat.
Notably, consumers require further dietary information, which has information of composition of people’s food or the whole variety of food at the press of a key. They may perhaps be simple or complex. They are simplee when it is necessary to provide information to standard cafe guest, i.e. crude break down. They are complex when they are associated to government foodstuff tables and give very accurate and detailed information, which is appropriate for scheming comprehensive dietary profiles (Law, Fuchs, & Ricci, 2011).
Lastly, technology has greatly influenced the event management system in the hospitality industry. Event managing system involves booking and managing of events such as conferences, weddings and meetings (Khosrowpour, 2002). The accessible services vary ranging from the price of food from the already designed menus and modules to the preparation of room arrangement on the computer screen and the capacity of giving a graphic outlook of how the room will look like from a particular angle. As by many current computers, detailed management reporting is a major feature (Reid & Bojanic, 2009).In conclusion, hospitality industry has grown overtime with a great influence from technology.
Arguably, hospitality was the first industry to use computing system technology in the 1950s, and it comprises more than 35% of the world’s foremost economic giant management systems with thorough management reporting being a key aspect. Initially, hospitality business had failed in many countries, but the introduction of the computing services changed everything. Among the notable things that technology has introduced into hospitality are the recordings of details in a transaction, improvement of food and beverage management systems, dietary analysis and event management systems. Additionally, the social media technology has also improved services of the hospitality firms. It is easier for the firms to advertise themselves online and get customers from all over the world. Technology has been of a great importance to the hospitality firms, and this improves daily with the improvement of technology.
