ICT Review

With today’s internet age, it provides a common platform for many different kinds of businesses to make use of information communication technologies to showcase their products and services.

Although information systems have provided enormous benefits and efficiencies, they have also created new ethical and social problems and challenges.  The technologies often grow much more rapidly than the ability of organizations to apply and use it. In order to keep up with this rapid grow, organizations have to invest on it. Nonetheless, managers often wonder how much they should actually spend on it or does the returns on their technologies investments worth the amount they spend on it. Other than these, the treats of individual privacy and intellectual property rights, computer related health problems, computer crimes, and elimination of jobs also concerned.

 Today, business rely heavily on information systems, any corruption will be a big disaster to the organizations. Therefore, managers must take special steps to ensure their security, accuracy, and reliability.

Despite the flaws as mentioned, ICT have also greatly helped business in improving its services. It enabled businesses to become more efficient on dealing with problems. Communications between businesses worldwide have been bridged and decision making have been made easier. Besides, customer relations have improved as companies are now able to respond faster to customer needs. Businesses are also able to penetrate into previously untapped markets with online websites.  Thus, with this, a study was commissioned to look into the sector of hotel industry to evaluate how ICT changed the hotel reservation process.

Before the Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) was developed, hotels have kept paper records in filing cabinets. However, hotels are much larger now with many customers to keep track of with regard to types of accommodations, whether low budget, luxury, or somewhere in between, as well as smoking or non-smoking preferences. Keeping track of large customer bases and all their attendant details would require an inordinate space for file cabinets and it is very time consuming for the employees to going back and forth to file cabinets looking up each client’s information.

It was also difficult to handle data accurately and efficiently as the employees could not retrieve the data at the time when needed and analyzing of past data is not accessible. Other difficulties also evolved when employees need to update, search, delete or edit customers’ details. Furthermore, security wise was not guaranteed to all information and the data may be lost or viewed by unauthorized people.

With the integration of ICT into the hotel’s business, hotels are now able to storage this vast database into a central system and retrieve them in a short notice. It is easier to backup the data and store it somewhere safe as compared previously as everything was voluminous paperwork. Billing is also made easier as there is direct connection with the other systems in a hotel ie. mini bars, PayTV and room services etc.

Besides making improvements to hotel’s businesses, it has also greatly benefitted consumers. Long gone are the days we as the customers have to actually call the various hotels to make bookings or even travel down to a travel agency to make reservations. No longer do we need to source for travel books or maps to find out the nearest attractions or the way to the hotel. It’s all available a click away now.

Nowadays, everything is integrated into a single site where different hotels are listed together. Beside room reservation services, these sites provide other features that help one plan better for the stay. The features include, travel guides, locality maps of surrounding areas, helpful reviews by previous hotel guests and many more.

With the Information and Communication Technologies introduce today, hotels and other enterprises in this sector are increasingly prompted to adopt these technologies, which enhance operating efficiency, improve service experience and access market on global basis, and market the hotels through recognized and trusted Brands, selected agencies.

With this in mind, a study was done into a few of the sites and below is one of those researched.

Asia Rooms

This website has an easy to navigate interface which provides various services besides hotel reservations.

The online bookings are made in 3 easy steps which includes filling in of particulars and debit/card card number for bookings done under 5 minutes. Besides, the transaction is totally secure as the site incorporates encryption technology to secure the information. This helps cut down the numerous paperwork needed as compared in the past where there’s a record for everything. 

Other services include a search finder which enables one to input the hotel name, check in-out dates and the number of people. With that, it locates the particular search entry and brings up the link of that particular hotel. From there, one can view the location of the hotel via locality map provided via google maps. Furthermore, there’s also a world map for one to locate the desired destination and check out the various hotels available in the city.

Other various helpful features include travel guides for an extensive number of countries. These guides provide write ups on the different places of interests, culture, religion and other information about the country. Most importantly, there is a review section which provides comments and recommendations based on their personal experiences. 

All in all, this site has bridged together previously a very tedious task by providing not only simple and detailed hotel bookings but also other useful information that had to be researched separately before the dawn of internet age.  This is only made possible because of the information communication technology that enabled various business services to be brought together under one roof (B2B). This can be clearly seen in the different services provided on the website such as google maps, different hotel rates and prices, forum reviews and search engines.

In conclusion, Information and Communication Technologies has help hotels operations to improve a lots, giving customers a more convenient way to make hotel reservations and make enquiry; it also helps to enable hotels and other organizations to operate more efficiently, and thus helps to stimulate the economy.