To say it bluntly, for our industry, 2021 was as challenging as, if not more so than the previous year. Words like quarantine, reopening, pent-up demand, staycation, restaffing, and more are now on everybody’s lips across the tourism industry. What’s more, our awareness of travel restrictions is as heightened as it’ll ever be and we’ve become the de-facto experts within our groups of friends when it comes to explaining where one can and can’t travel.
Photo by Moritz Knöringer on Unsplash
Despite this prolonged period of crisis, we still lack any long-term visibility, and uncertainty will likely be the biggest certainty during the first few weeks and months of the new year. Having experienced such uncertainty for the seemingly longest time, at Portier, we got a little used to the situation and took advantage of the “quiet” period to address two key things.
Recruitment
What became clear to us was that we needed a larger technology presence in our largest market of Thailand, in order to better support our clients across the region. As a simple result, we recruited a Bangkok-based team of software engineers and now continue to put more emphasis on building more locally.
Product Development
On the product front, we focused the effort of 2021 on the staff element of our software and improved both the visibility of the guest experience from a hotel staff perspective and the availability of tools for back-office operations of hotel staff members.
In a pragmatic sense, this means that hotel staff members now have on-demand access to the guests’ experience on the Portier Platform and benefit from better knowledge of current offers, latest communications, general content, and more.
In addition to this, the internal communication platforms, including the chat feature and the voice-enabled exchange have been improved to ensure a more reliable transition from staff-to-staff conversations to staff-to-guest ones. We see this as a further step towards simplicity and it helps us continue the journey towards a more harmonised relationship between guests and staff, something many travellers are looking for during these uncertain times in particular.
Looking ahead to 2022, we have more development in store and we look forward to working more closely with our hotel partners, in order to develop features directly requested and needed by those partners.
Aside from anything related to our company, we have no choice but to be optimistic about the future, and we will participate as much as we can, in order to make the coming year a year of genuine recovery for the industry. In that sense, we were obsessed with “the best places to visit” content like THIS and love the idea of exploring again in the near future.