Enabling hotels for the Experience Era:
Interview with Annette Hogan, Amadeus

Annette Hogan, Head of the Amadeus Hospitality Business Group in North America, believes we are living in the Experience Era. Demanding guests are demanding excellent experiences at every stage of interaction with your hotel.

After spending eight months on the road, meeting hoteliers to learn about their critical business issues, Annette Hogan is very clear about the role Amadeus needs to perform for its customers. “Our job is to tidy up a myriad of conflicting systems and enable hoteliers to meet the guest’s expectations of excellence.”

With a career resumé that spans airline IT sales, cruise lines, hotels marketing and revenue management, as well as tour operations, Annette believes she is in a good position to take a 360 degree view on the needs of hospitality providers. Particularly as the convergence of hotels IT systems with distribution opens up new opportunities to deliver great guest experiences.

“I learnt to look at the world through the guest’s eyes. Both corporate and leisure guests are very demanding – and rightly so. Their time and money is precious to them and they want excellence.”

Bring it all together

Hotels used to focus primarily on the “on-property” guest experience. Now they are working to deliver excellent pre- and post- experiences. “Once a hotel has got a guest, they don’t want to lose them because they failed to follow up properly or delight the guest when they try to book with you the next time. But it is hard to meet the guest’s expectation of excellence across the board with antiquated and unscaleable systems.”

Rationalising fragmented systems – which often do not talk to each other let alone integrate – is where Annette believes Amadeus can make a difference. Not only will this streamline processes and enable profit-boosting initiatives like Revenue Management, improving and integrating IT can give hotels a view on their ROI on everything from marketing to distribution. “Just like guests, hotels want value from their spend. We can help them identify where and how they get value.”

The right team

Since joining Amadeus just eight months ago, Annette has personally met 50 customers – a mix from the largest chains to small independents – to understand what they need.

At the same time, she has been assembling a multi-disciplinary team, made up of distribution and IT specialists, who can deliver integrated solutions that fulfil the promise of convergence.

“We are bringing a new vision to the marketplace. A holistic vision that brings together IT with distribution in an unprecedented way. We now have a stellar team and we practice what we preach – our distribution people are very exposed to IT initiatives – and our IT people work very closely with our distribution side.”

The response from the market has been very positive. “People can see the possibilities of convergence. They can understand that the Amadeus positioning is valuable and unique. We have not made a lot of noise in the North American marketplace – you’ll hear a lot more from us in the future.”