COVID 19: The catalyst for digital transformation in the hospitality industry?

Abstract

Despite its benefits related to efficiency, creating better customer experiences, increasing revenue, and supporting decision-making, until the outbreak of COVID-19 digital transformation was not on many hotels’ strategic plans. However, like in many other industries, the COVID-19 physical distancing good practices and governments’ restrictions acted as catalysts and promoted hotel digitalization. To this end, a questionnaire was administered to 51 hotel managers to verify if that happened in Portuguese hotels and what processes were most impacted. Results showed that 92% of the hotel managers agreed that COVID-19 promoted the digitalization of processes, with most organizations considering that online meetings and technology productivity tools are here to stay. Hotels’ digitalization has the potential to generate high-efficiency gains both in public-facing operations and back-office operations. This study highlights these implications and intends to spur researchers to investigate the practical impact of these implications on business efficiency and social theory.

Rethinking Tourism Industry in Pandemic COVID-19 Period

“…This global crisis may be a source of opportunity to identify new possibilities, and the problematic situation is an additional argument for accepting changes in tourism business models towards sustainability. One of the critical effects that the COVID-19 pandemic had on tourism was accelerating the digitization of processes in the tourism industry, as stated by some authors [24]. Another spillover effect of the pandemic crisis on the global economy and environment was reducing GHG emissions caused by decreasing travel [25].…”

How firms cope with social crisis: The mediating role of digital transformation as a strategic response to the COVID-19 pandemic

“…In other words, it eliminates the block of space and time, which allows firms to exploit external and internal resources to operate business activities [ 41 ]. For instance, digital transformation can improve promotional activities with a falling total expense [ 21 ]; digital transformation enables employees to work from home to keep physical a distance when the area where the office is located is temporarily blocked [ 42 ]; Microsoft designed a cloud-based platform, known as Azure, that enable healthcare providers to acquire related medical resources quickly [ 39 ]; education sector also offers online courses for avoiding potential infection risk among students [ 43 ]. Thus, we hypothesize:…”

Digital transformation trends in service industries

“…In video services, Netflix’s videotape vending machine service has evolved into a streaming service. In accommodation and hospitality services, the application of mobile phones, the Internet, and mobile applications have revolutionized the reservation system (António and Rita 2021 ). Bank payment services have evolved from telephone transfer services to automated teller machine (ATM) account transfers, PayPal, internet banking, and mobile banking (Flood et al 2013 ).…”