Disruptive Innovation: How e-Solutions and Herd Mentality Continue to Drive Competition Within the Hospitality Industry 

When the pandemic hit, hotels and venues were forced to find new ways to successfully offer customers a better experience. Enter e-solutions: digitized programs and platforms that allow users to easily perform tasks online without face-to-face interaction. Being an early adopter of new approaches can feel risky and intimidating, but the payoff was big for the hotels and venues who quickly pivoted. Using e-solutions, they’ve streamlined processes, reduced handling costs, increased security, and improved the customer experience, ultimately seeing higher returns. 

With their adoption of e-solutions, these early players created disruptive innovation in the market. By providing a better alternative to the status quo, they established new customer expectations and definitions for success. The more the early adopters become the majority, the more everyone else must embrace change, ignore risk, and accept a new herd mentality if they want to stay competitive.  

After all, everyone shares the same end goal: providing customers with a great experience that’ll create repeat purchases and new referrals. The ability to anticipate change and be prepared to handle unpredictable factors such as higher resource costs or staff turnover rates is a way to stay ahead. Technology can make it easier to pivot quickly and at scale with fewer resources. Case-in-point: the pandemic, which highlighted technology gaps within the industry. 75% of hospitality executives agreed that the pandemic accelerated their adoption of modern technology, and hoteliers without it struggled to keep up with customer demands. In fact, it’s been found that 90% of guests look for automated travel options and 50% are willing to pay more if e-solutions are available. Some companies attempted workarounds, only automating one area of business, but that quickly broke down other areas. 

The competitive nature of the hospitality industry has created and fostered a space for the e-solution market to grow. It’s clear the herd mentality that once held companies back from innovation is now transforming the former “disruptive innovation” into a necessity for success. Competitive pressures and customer needs have pushed hotels and venues to rely on e-solutions and automation to deliver successful results. Those e-solutions give a hotel or venue a significant advantage by offering a seamless, digital experience for customers before, during, and after their stay – while giving staff time back in their workdays to focus on more pressing matters and the in-person customer experience. 

There’s only one question left: what’s coming next?