Strategic information system management plan for Thaistralia Hotel

Background
Thaistralia Hotel is a 3-Star holiday hotel with 100 rooms, which is located in a world-famous tourism destination. The hotel was operating well, and obtained good reputation in the industry. However, in the past quarter, the complaints increased by 25 percent, and 50 percent of such complaints was about the reception’s low efficiency in check in and check out processes, as well as slow response speed to customers’ demand.

External environment
Thaistralia Hotel is located in a tropical island country, which attracts millions’ of tourists from all over the world every year. Also, there are many other holiday hotels in this region as well. Therefore, the competition is becoming increasingly intense. In addition, the tourist season is coming soon, and normally the big amount of tourists’ coming burden the hotel, especially the reception, with heavy workload.

Internal environment
Currently, the hotel is still applying telephone booking and manual check in approaches. In the tourist season, the reception tends to employ more part-time staffs to do the check in and check out job. Nevertheless, sometimes the service speed still can not satisfy customers.

Problem
The hotel received increasing complaints in the past quarter. Furthermore, the employment of extra receptionists in the tourist season increases the hotel’s salary payment by 10,000 dollars every year on average.

Information system solution
An information system is introduced to Thaistralia Hotel, which is basically composed by an e-booking system and 100 sets of scanning equipment (which will be installed outside each room of the hotel). A tourist can book rooms online by the e-booking system conveniently; also, they can even check in online as well after pay the room rate by online payment or telephone payment. The system will send a barcode to the customer’s mobile phone after online check in; with such barcode, the customer can go to the booked room directly when arrive at the hotel, and enter the room by scanning the barcode on the equipment on the door.

Benefits
The application of such information system will improve the efficiency of the reception. Additionally, it will help the hotel to reduce labour costs.

Goal and indicators
The goal is to reduce the complaints by 30 percent and reduce the labour costs by 8,000 dollars within the next 3 months after the implementation of the information system.

Furthermore, such goal can be used as one of the indicators as well. After those 3 months, the executives of Thaistralia Hotel can evaluate the effectiveness of the system by examining if the goal has been achieved. In addition, internal and external surveys- which are respectively for employees and customers- can be made to obtain the feedback on the information system, in order to improve it and make it works more effectively and efficiently.