In order to provide recommendations to all of the stakeholders involved, who understandably might have a limited understanding of the inner workings of
crowdsourcing, a framework has been constructed that provides example solutions to potential industry challenges based on the stakeholder and the type of solution the crowd can provide.
The first horizontal axis represents the stakeholders in the lodging industry: the owners, the brand and the management firm. The brand is the identity of the hotel, it is responsible for the image, product design, and marketing. The goal of the brand is to drive customers into the hotel to increase revenue. The management firm is the
operational core of the hotel, responsible for its employees and processes. The goal of the management firm is to deliver the brand promise as cost effectively as possible. It is motivated to be a good steward of the owner’s investment through a fixed percentage of the revenue. The owner provides the funding for the hotel, taking actions in order to maximize its return on investment. As each stakeholder has a unique area of
responsibility and goals, it is understandable that each would benefit from crowdsourced solutions in their own way.
The vertical axis represents ways in which the crowd can be called upon in order to provide innovative solutions to lodging industry problems. The authors have chosen to utilize the categories developed by Brabham (2012), Organization represents the crowd’s ability to collect together and organize information. Optimization is the ability of the crowd to be presented with a problem, the solutions to which possess an
empirically measurable improvement over the existing state. Ideation is the crowd’s ability to generate new ideas and concepts, typically matters of taste or preference.
Lastly, Analysis refers to using the crowd to solve problems that are beyond the organization’s current computational abilities.
Alongside the types of problems listed in Table 1 are examples of how crowds might be used to identify innovative solutions to typical lodging problem areas. For example hotel owners could task the crowd with an organization type challenge by asking them to gather information related to existing terms and conditions in addition to law suits and their outcomes. A management firm might decide to conduct an
optimization challenge by asking the crowd to develop a more efficient Housekeeping Cart, one that requires less space, or has a greater carrying capacity at its current size.
A brand might task the crowd with developing an ideation solution; requesting that the crowd generate new benefits and rewards for the brand loyalty program.
Table 1 Crowdsourcing framework in the lodging industry (with examples)
Solution type Brand Management
firm
Ownership
Organization:
Finding and collecting information into a common
Amenity Preferences
Employee benefits
Financing terms Franchise fees
location and format Wallpaper Color Bedding
Laundry chemicals Accounting software
Brand availability
Optimization:
Solving empirical problems
Wireless Internet Business Center Layout
Room Ergonomics
Housekeeping cart
Car pool program Energy savings
Location selection
Meeting room design CapEx budgeting
Ideation:
Creating and selecting creative ideas
Loyalty Program New Logo Design Kids Programs
Employee menu Staff
recognition Cost savings program
Management terms Recreation amenities Spa equipment/design
Analysis:
Analyzing large amounts of information
Comment Cards Employee surveys
Expense statistics
7 Conclusion
Crowdsourcing, as an innovation technique, can be beneficial to hotels as they seek to adapt to new trends in the industry. New trends will require new marketing tactics, product offerings, procedures, training and financing. These transitional efforts won’t come cheap or easy, and will require a renewed investment in innovation in the industry. It is in this spirit that the authors recommend that the industry consider and explore new innovation techniques—especially ones that are less costly, time consuming, and resource intensive. The authors have outlined below some industry report supported emerging trends, noting how they could be addressed through the pursuit of crowdsourcing solutions.
Guests are seeking out an international presence with a local feel. Crowdsourcing can assist firms that are expanding internationally that need to ensure they are properly catering to the local culture. Tapping into local online communities can allow firms to design competitions that seek to determine what local preferences are, and how best they can be replicated, efficiently, within the hotel. Emerging markets have a lower GDP than developed nations, which allows for the possibility of motivating the crowd through primarily monetary means. Firms seeking cheap labor to complete a distributed task have benefited from crowdsourcing platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk.
Over one third of Amazon’s crowd is made up of participants from developing nations (Ross, Irani, Silberman, Zaldivar, & Tomlinson, 2010).
Guests are seeking out authenticity and personalization. How can hotels optimize their interactions with guests to make them both more authentic and appealing to the individual? Recommendations from the crowd can be sorted and ranked by the crowd, and the hotel can make the determination of which to pursue based on the costs
involved. Threadless, a website that allows the crowd to submit and vote on t-shirt designs, operates in a similar manner (Brabham, 2010). By better understanding guest, their needs and wants, hotels can better tailor their offerings to appeal to guest’s desire for a more unique, personalized experience.
Guest care about sustainability. How can hotels become more sustainable in the future? The crowd can be tapped to generate ideas for operational practices and product offerings which are: more efficient, reduce consumption, and are more
environmentally friendly. The crowd can also be asked to optimize existing processes and procedures. Recently NASA partnered with TopCoder, a crowdsourcing platform with an informational technology and programming crowd, in order to develop a more efficient emergency kit for the International Space Station (McKeown, 2012). What do space saving measures in space have to do with innovation in the lodging industry?
This same challenge can be presented to the crowd, but instead of an emergency kit on a space station, it could be the housekeeping cart. A more efficient cart would be able to carry more improving efficiency, reducing waste, in addition to being beneficial to the housekeepers themselves.
Recognizing the inherent value in crowdsourcing as an innovation technique, hotel brands have already begun to incorporate open innovation practices into their research and development efforts. These initial forays into the world of co-creation have already borne fruit. By inviting the guest into the product develop process in addition to
soliciting ideas on how to re-imagine the entire hotel experience hotel brands have shown an interest in better methods for engaging their guests, co-creating solutions with their guests, and opening up the innovation process itself to the worldwide crowd
(Trejos, 2013). Where the lodging industry leads, the rest of the tourism industry very well could follow. Once the benefits of crowdsourcing are made apparent, and industry practices for crowdsourcing management are formalized, it is expected that
crowdsourcing with its ability to deliver robust results faster and cheaper than alternative innovation methods will spread rapidly throughout the tourism industry.
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© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2016
Roman Egger, Igor Gula and Dominik Walcher (eds.), Open Tourism, Tourism on the Verge, DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-54089-9_7
(1)
Improving Hotel Industry Processes Through Crowdsourcing Techniques
Jose Luis Galdon-Salvador
1, Fernando J. Garrigos-Simon
1and Ignacio Gil-Pechuan
1Universitat Politècnica de València, Valencia, Spain
Jose Luis Galdon-Salvador (Corresponding author) Email: [email protected]
Fernando J. Garrigos-Simon Email: [email protected] Ignacio Gil-Pechuan
Email: [email protected]
Keywords Crowdsourcing – Open innovation – Hospitality – Tourism value chain
1 Introduction
Businesses have to reinvent their strategies continuously in order to adapt to
increasingly complex and dynamic market realities. In the hospitality industry, it is particularly difficult for companies to set themselves apart from their competitors and to offer better and cheaper products. Nowadays, hotels find it more difficult than before to remain competitive and consumers have unprecedented access to information and networks, which has increased competition in the sector. At the same time, new technologies have created new production models and ways of innovation in which customer participation has become the new value companies need to aspire to
(Garrigos-Simon, Lapiedra-Alcamí, & Ribera, 2012). In this vein, the implementation of new techniques and especially the participation of people, have to be considered a vital part of the industry’s processes in order to improve and transform the value chain.
Tourism has a very close relationship with new information and communication technologies. It is believed that thorough knowledge of a wide range of quality
techniques for spreading information online can improve the business management of tourism managers (Buhalis, 1998). However, tourism companies cannot focus solely on marketing. They must be open to new innovation which can improve all areas of their activities. In order to meet this challenge, our study aims to explore how the
participation of customers and other stakeholders in crowdsourcing techniques in different organisational areas can help hotels to be more competitive. Messerli (2011)) suggests that experience in the tourism industry has shown that the role of both direct and indirect dialogue is especially relevant. In this context, the use of new techniques to involve stakeholders in the different phases of the development, creation and selling of tourism products is critical not only to be competitive, but also to survive.
Crowdsourcing techniques centre on this. They are conceived as a combination of traditional outsourcing alongside the participation of a broad range of stakeholders and other people in a particular process. In this chapter, we analyse how the new
environment is changing, how it is essential to look at the value chain of organisations in this shifting environment and how we can use crowdsourcing techniques to transform and improve the different sections of the new value chain of organisations.
This chapter attempts to define and explore the importance of crowdsourcing
activities in the value chain processes of companies. It begins with an in-depth study of the relevant literature about the transformation of the value chain in tourism and the concept of crowdsourcing. Following this, the paper focuses on describing the main uses of crowdsourcing and also provides several examples of its use in hotels. The chapter ends with the conclusions and limitations of the study.