Local hospitality industry needs to invest more in ICT

With over one million tourists per annum, Namibia is known globally as a top ecotourism destination and it’s a sector that’s growing as evidenced by the 5% year on year growth in international traffic into Namibia.

Tourism is the second largest sector contributor to the GDP after mining and with 20% of formal employment directly related to the tourism sector, ensuring a top quality tourist experience is key to sustaining and enhancing the tourism sector.

Connectivity is integral to the whole travel process from pre-trip planning and booking, to check-in processes and online access at the departing airport, and even during the flight as more airlines are beginning to offer Wi-Fi mid-air, to connectivity requirements at the hotel destination and of course the post-holiday experience of sharing holiday snaps with friends and family; although the post-holiday sharing is happening more often at the actual holiday destination thus increasing connectivity requirements at hotel destinations for photo sharing, video Skype calls and more.

“Free Wi-Fi is the most cited hotel amenity request in multiple surveys across the world whereby lack of it is considered a deal-breaker whereby they’d look for an alternative hotel. Latest tourism statistics indicate that German tourists stay on average 19-25 days in country. These tourists have high expectations on connectivity in terms of service speed, quality, overall experience and typically for the service to be free at their hotel. This means hotels and the hospitality industry need to invest in more in ICT to match the guest expectation and overall experience,” said Marc Gregan, General Manager, AfricaOnline Namibia.

Hotels should focus on Wi-Fi as a valued guest amenity rather than an extension of a hotel’s IT operation. This may mean an investment in IT support staff for out of hours troubleshooting and extending or improving its coverage to requested guest areas.

The hospitality sector is a 24/7 service orientated business and provision of WiFi is no different, yet often the service staff lack the requisite skills. Hotels need to assess how much bandwidth capacity is required for a typical guest usage pattern of its holiday makers or business travellers taking into account that the average traveller will have 3 Wi-Fi-enabled devices and may use all of them during peak periods.

“Hotels can also consider adopting a new trend for a hybrid model of basic free Wi-Fi for all guests to enable access to email and browsing, and a premium or tiered paying model for faster speed requirements and video downloads,” said Gregan.

This also highlights that managing and monitoring the hotel guest Wi-Fi is a definite necessity to ensure consistency in service delivery and eliminating any potential abuse. Even basic monitoring by MAC address duration on the network will help eliminate non-guest usage where access password to a free Wi-Fi service is being used by unauthorised users.