Over the past year of running Ignite Hospo we have spoken to many hospitality business owners and operators, and heard from leaders across the industry. It's clear that digital tools can provide many benefits to a business: improving the customer experience; increasing revenue; reducing workforce costs; and saving the owner time.

Hospitality businesses may be losing 20% to 30% of annual revenue due to poor tech adoption and inefficiencies.

The appetite is there, but actually introducing a new tool takes effort. So here are five quick tips for introducing a new technology to your hospitality business.

1. Start with a task someone hates. Solve a problem, save someone time, remove a repetitive task someone hates doing. e.g. if someone has to download data from 3 different platforms and reconcile them to create an end-of-day/week report, look at integrations that can bring the data together for them. There are tools that can aggregate customer reviews from the various social/review platforms and give you a single report. Or ask an LLM (like ChatGPT) to convert your random data into a table for you.‍
2. Start with a proof of concept or experiment. It can be daunting comparing all the different tech solutions to do the thing you want to do. Figuring out which features, pricing structures, and contract conditions suit your business can add hours of research – when you don’t even know yet if it’s worth it. Instead, you could pick any tool that does the job (especially if someone on your team knows how to use it) and experiment with it. Does automating this task actually make a difference? Maybe not quite, and you need to tweak something first. Or you learn that there’s a particular feature you do really need for it to be valuable. Now you can make a more informed decision on the right tool for the job, and know what to look for to find the best option for you.‍
3. Start with a champion. Driving change is easier when you focus on the champions, not the detractors. Figure out who in your team or organisation would be enthusiastic and recruit them to support (or lead) the experiments with new tech.‍
4. Start with what you have. Already running some hospo tech? Their customer success team would probably love to jump on a call to help you do more with it. Your finance platform probably has a thousand other apps it can integrate with. Your online booking platform would love to share data with your PMS or POS systems. Ask them how they can help!‍
5. Start with your peers. Hospo is a people industry, so you could always start by asking your peers and network for a demo of how they do things.‍

Bonus tip: Make it easy for your team. You might be the one introducing the tech, and setting it up, and have all the admin privileges that the platform allows. You’ve spent hours getting up to speed — don’t just lob it over the fence and expect your team to know how to use it. At the same time, don’t overwhelm them with every training manual and onboarding video you can find. Give them just enough training – a curated list of what they need to know to do their job. That might be a handful of functions plus your operational context (e.g. only use it for suppliers X and Y, not Z).

That's where Paddl can help. Our Hospitality Workspaces and Tech Adoption Programs gather the need-to-know information and how-to guides all in one place, to get your employees up to speed (and up to date) quickly.

Get in touch for a free demo and get started today.