There's a widely held perception that the hotel industry is slow to pick up on new technologies, but the chief technology officer for the American Hotel and Lodging Association said that perception doesn't match reality.
AHLA's Mike Blake, who still leads industry tech organization Hospitality Technology Next Generation, said he's seen a continual push for innovation in hospitality.
"In our industry, it's very easy to kind of think big, start small and then scale fast," he said in an interview with Hotel News Now at the 2023 Hotel Data Conference. "Few industries have that. Most industries are more monolithic, whereas we have the ability to change hotels, resorts or any one of these individual instances, try something out and if it works to scale it pretty quickly."
Blake said there are both upsides and downsides to the fragmented nature of the hotel industry. In banking, for example, changes can be more easily dictated from on high, but there's also less of a spirit of entrepreneurship to help spur forward change.
"The ability to scale and the capability to effect change is very prevalent in our industry, and I do think that when they say we aren't very innovative, I push on that a lot," he said.
To that end, Blake said HTNG continues to work with groups of collaborators from across the industry to tackle big problems and improve how technology works at all hotels.
"Our work groups are evolving to not just be a standard on a piece of paper but also demonstrating use, which I think is really a cool thing," he said.