8.9.2024
Alex Alt, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Oracle Hospitality, stepped into his role in 2019, just as the world braced for a global pandemic. His extensive experience in the hospitality industry, spanning leadership roles at Rosewood Hotels and Resorts, Sabre Hospitality Solutions, and Stack Sports, uniquely positioned him to guide Oracle Hospitality through a period of unprecedented change and innovation. This period saw a rapid acceleration in the adoption of cloud-based solutions as hotels sought greater agility and efficiency in the face of unprecedented challenges. Alt, with his deep understanding of both the operational and technological needs of the industry, was instrumental in steering Oracle Hospitality’s strategy to meet these evolving demands.
In his first interview in more than three years with Hotel Technology News, Alt delves into Oracle Hospitality’s cloud strategy, highlighting the success of its OPERA Cloud platform and the factors driving its rapid adoption among renowned hotel brands. He discusses the company’s comprehensive approach to data migration, ensuring a smooth transition to modern platforms with minimal disruption to operations. He also explains the power of data integration and the role of OPERA Cloud Central, a unified system designed to streamline operations and enhance the guest experience. He highlights the integration of Nor1, an AI-powered merchandising platform, into OPERA Cloud, enabling hotels to offer personalized room upgrades, amenities, and services throughout the guest journey. Looking ahead, Alt shares Oracle Hospitality’s vision for the future, emphasizing the company’s commitment to continuous innovation and expansion into new markets and segments.
Can you share some of the key strategies that have led to the rapid adoption of Oracle Hospitality’s cloud solutions among renowned hotel brands?
The most crucial aspect to the success of OPERA Cloud is that it’s a great product our customers love. OPERA Cloud is a feature rich, flexible and intuitive solution for hoteliers of any business and service model. This solution is available anywhere in the globe, which is what gives our multi-regional accounts the solutions and the confidence to grow their brands and never worry about any technology constraints. Moreover, all of our capabilities come on the same single technology platform, which is the only way to standardize and secure data and processes across the entire brand. But I can also offer three additional factors that explain the rapid adoption of our cloud solutions.
First: the focus in the industry on speed to market. In the past four years, we have seen technological changes executed in a matter of months or weeks that previously would have taken years. This has created several new trends in the industry that call for new solutions, including a need for increased operational efficiency and a need to bring in new revenue.
Second, our OPERA Cloud solution enables brands and hoteliers of every market segment to achieve their business transformation through the power of technology. The proof is in our accelerated growth with thousands of active OPERA Cloud sites and over 1,000 OHIP partners onboarded in our OHIP platform, ready for a frictionless plug in.
OPERA Cloud takes their operational efficiency to the next level, gives them new revenue opportunities and allows them to plug in very quickly and very easily any innovative solution in the industry through the power of our Oracle Hospitality Integration Platform. OPERA Cloud is a secure, reliable, flexible solution for any service and business model in the industry; it features a mobile and intuitive UI with automation infused in the most complex workflows of operations. OPERA Cloud has rapid release cycles, and our customers enjoy new features and innovation every 2-3 months.
The third factor is the peace of mind that comes with the stability and power of investment of Oracle for its industry solutions. Oracle hospitality is committed to long term investments and innovation to keep hoteliers as agile as they want to be for the long run. Oracle Hospitality consistently, and quickly, innovates to meet the growing needs of the industry.
How does Oracle Hospitality assist hotel brands in their tech transformation journey, particularly in migrating data to modern, cloud-based platforms?
With the industry seeking assistance on digital transformation, Oracle provides expert guidance to successfully implement the OPERA Cloud hospitality solutions, tailored for the particular service model and business transformation aspiration of each customer, from independent hotels to global multi-brand chains that need rapid deployment at scale. We offer our customers the tools and services they need to expedite and de-risk the migration process, bring hotels online with uniformity and minimal disruption to their operations, and help team members with change management. In the past few years, we have invested in automation around data migration and deployment processes, which helped to significantly reduce the impact and cost for the properties moving to the cloud.
But we didn’t stop there. We expanded our OPERA Cloud Hospitality Platform with OPERA Cloud Central to provide hotel brands with a unified system that helps them accelerate their business transformation across all their functions, on or above property. Next to OPERA Cloud Property Management and Sales and Events Management, OPERA Cloud Central includes distribution connectivity, contact center application, central sales, enterprise management, and loyalty on a single platform.
How does OPERA Cloud Central differ from other similar systems in the market? What are the advantages of having a unified system like OPERA Cloud Central for hotel businesses?
At Oracle Hospitality, we’ve relied on more than 30 years of experience in the market providing property solutions to extend our platform to now offer above-property features as well. Unifying key data elements such as profiles, ARI, reservations, groups, and events means hotels can now offer a consistent experience at all customer touch points, increasing revenue opportunities, expanding their distribution networks, and optimizing operational efficiencies.
OPERA Cloud Central transforms hotel brands by connecting core elements across property and brand management operations, consolidating data and workflows in a single user interface. This removes redundancies, streamlines processes, and allows hotels to maximize their revenue and distribution opportunities. Additionally, OPERA Cloud Central helps to reduce the number of vendors that hotels and brands need to rely on to deliver their services, simplifying and reducing the overall cost of their tech ecosystem.
By removing data silos that occur when you have to move data between multiple unrelated systems, OPERA Cloud Central helps hotels to not only save time but reduce potential for data inconsistencies. It brings together the call center, enterprise management, central sales, distribution, and loyalty all into one place. With a unified platform, a business’s interoperability increases as data becomes more connected, more easily accessible and gains the benefits of consistent security. Every contact point is connected, so staff get a full picture of room availability, pricing, customer preferences, history, and more. It really can simplify day-to-day operations, helping employees maximize time and value, and enhance the overall guest experience.
How does Oracle Hospitality OPERA Cloud platform facilitate hyper-personalization for guests with the use of AI tools?
AI-driven automation can help hotels offer more targeted customer service and guest experiences. Oracle Hospitality’s Nor1 application is now embedded in OPERA Cloud and enables hoteliers to offer personalized merchandising offers for room upgrades, room attributes such as balconies or floor preferences, non-room products and services like early check-in, parking, or even food and beverage packages. Guests interact with these offers via email, apps, mobile web, messaging, and in-person from the moment they are booking all the way up until their arrival. And Oracle’s solutions enable every offer to be selected, ordered, and priced via real-time machine learning, which helps enhance operational efficiency and personalize customer interactions.
Using AI and machine learning creates an ongoing progression of personalization that evolves from the guests’ context-based decisions to micro-segmented perspective of the guest that are based on that individual’s real-time interaction through the reservation life cycle – which offer did they accept, and which did they ignore. It’s AI and machine learning that gives our applications the ability to dig into the data and deliver hyper-personalized offers that are tailored to each guest.
Oracle Hospitality enables hoteliers to efficiently leverage guest data in OPERA Cloud to deliver personalized experiences that cater to individual preferences and past stays. From pre-stocking minibars to recommending scenic high-floor rooms to selling non-alcoholic amenities, AI can present targeted hotel offerings with the highest probability of conversion. This eliminates generic accommodations and elevates guest satisfaction by providing offers the guest will actually buy.
Can you share some insights on Oracle’s role in the deployment of usable AI in hospitality?
Oracle Hospitality’s AI and Machine Learning solutions are built on the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, which combines all the services and components needed – such as data center infrastructure, security, compliance, governance, observability, and management – to build and scale AI applications for the hospitality industry.
We include comprehensive AI services and state-of-the-art generative AI innovations on a best-in-class AI infrastructure, which allows for Oracle and Oracle Hospitality to address industry challenges using LLMs alongside proprietary company data to analyze massive amounts of data sets of language to efficiently train our AI models.
Oracle’s process results in added business value to hospitality industry stakeholders by helping to increase revenue and guest satisfaction, while simultaneously reducing expenses via automation and improving productivity and decision making. This means we have solutions that can address a wide variety of use-cases including pricing, inventory management, merchandising, and content creation.
How does the Oracle Hospitality Integration Platform (OHIP) help hoteliers deliver personalized guest experiences? How does it support hoteliers in maximizing profitability and encouraging loyalty?
Oracle Hospitality Integration Platform (OHIP) is a massive differentiator that makes our solution really stand out, and it has helped hoteliers deliver personalized experiences in any number of ways by seamlessly connecting the hotel or brand to downstream partners through our hospitality marketplace. By making integrations simple and efficient via self-service partner onboarding, hotels can quickly and without risk take advantage of vast network of OHIP partners. Hotels can also use OHIP to create their own solutions such as digital guest experience journey that is uniquely tailored to the kind of service levels they want to deliver to their guest. Recognizing guests, rewarding their behaviors, and delivering on the brand promise can help hoteliers increase guest satisfaction and drive guest loyalty.
With a searchable database of thousands APIs, OHIP can be a go-to spot for hoteliers to visit when they need new capabilities. We are onboarding on average every single day a new partner in our ecosystem . The integration platform is all about simplifying integrations to bring innovations faster to market.
How does the adoption of OPERA Cloud Sales and Event Management improve insights into guest preferences and optimize event space management?
Oracle Hospitality OPERA Cloud Sales and Event Management is a flexible solution that simplifies team’s workflows with dashboards and layouts that can be accessed via mobile devices and tailored to suit individual and team needs, helping to increase efficiency across the entire team by unifying operations and sales.
The solution provides easy access to key information such as inventory, space availability, and customer profile information that reduces response times and supports relationship management. It can also provide additional revenue opportunities with extensibility and integration options.
Additionally, this solution helps hoteliers by collecting essential information such as customer contact information to speed up bookings, and consolidates data in real time to effectively sell hotel rooms and event spaces in one place. It can also help hoteliers simplify catering resource management with flexible menu options, item inventory control, and other event-specific data points all from a cloud solution. This means it can be accessed on-the-go from supported mobile devices or remotely from anywhere in the world.
What does Oracle Hospitality see on the horizon that you can share?
Despite the fact that our OPERA Cloud PMS is already leading the marketplace, we still see a long runway for the solution laid out ahead of us, in our current and new market segments as well as additional countries around the world. Additionally, we have high ambitions for OPERA Cloud Central as an industry disrupter and complementary growth engine to our traditionally core PMS business. In the coming years, we will look to expand into even more markets and new segments, while still extending the markets we are already in.
We are currently working closely with our restaurant industry team to collaborate on loyalty acquisition and engagement at the point of service, and operational excellence such as intuitive user experience, real-time guest insights, as well as enhancing the integration between OPERA Cloud and Oracle MICROS Simphony to streamline workflows and data insights for restaurants, quick service, and bars, etc. within hotels.
Oracle Payments is another exciting offering, and it’s the fastest growing solution within our business. It is now deeply integrated with OPERA Cloud and Oracle MICROS Simphony, and hotels, restaurants, and stadiums around the world are already taking advantage of it.
Oracle is constantly working to add new capabilities to our platforms that will help simplify an overly complex technology landscape across the hospitality industry. By continuing to streamline the technology ecosystem, we’re giving our customers real, tangible upside and, in parallel, ensuring there is a source of future growth for Oracle Hospitality.