Technology in Hospitality Industry: Prospects and Challenges

The leisure and hospitality industry is one of the driving forces of the global economy. The widespread adoption of new technologies in this industry over recent years has fundamentally reshaped the way in which services are provided and received. However, there are still major challenges that need to be addressed to ensure that this industry maintains a steady pace in adoption of future technologies. In this paper, we identify these challenges and describe the problems they pose for guests and hospitality service providers (HSP). As a means to overcome these challenges, we propose a novel fog-assisted architecture which creates a sound technological framework with specialized guest-facing and back-of-house (BoH) management systems geared towards improving guest experience, enhancing business insight, and increasing revenue. The proposed architecture integrates cloud services platform with Internet of things (IoT) devices at the edge of the network through intermediary fog computing nodes to create an architectural paradigm with the benefits of both distributed computing and centralized analytics. The layered structure of this architecture facilitates interoperability between heterogeneous systems as well as resource sharing and cooperation between multiple deployments and implementations. Moreover, the adaptability of this architecture promotes scalability making it suitable for hotels of different caliber, and guarantees upgradability making it possible to add new and improved hospitality services in the future.