WASHINGTON, D.C. The American Hotel & Lodging Association (AH&LA) has created an E-Business Committee, specifically geared to educate and inform the hotel industry about the benefits of and strategies for facilitating e-business, e-procurement and the use of the Internet as a business tool.
The new committee comprises 20 members and plans to meet at the AH&LA s fall and spring meetings. “Ad hoc meetings” may occur in between regularly scheduled meetings as required and “quite a few internal conference calls with committee members” will take place, according to Frank Nardozza, the new committee s chairman and hospitality industry director at KPMG Consulting.
Nardozza says that the membership roster for the new committee will be capped at 25.
Topping the list of issues on the E-Business Committee s agenda is the development of strategies to measure return on investment for major e-business initiatives. Nardozza points out that hospitality industry companies are spending a lot of money on technology and e-business initiatives, but don t know how to measure the success and return on investment realized by such activity.
“Our goal is to develop a standard for executing a full costing summary against which a company can measure the productivity resulting from technological investments. We want hoteliers to cost these initiatives as they would if they were going to build a new hotel,” said Nardozza.
“Time and effort must be calculated into the cost of implementation and then it must be determined where the resulting revenue stream is going to come from in order to realize productivity,” he added.
Also on the agenda of issues being addressed by the new committee are: what it takes for hotel companies and franchisees to be ready to do e-business, as well as the establishment of “Best Practices” guidelines.
According to Nardozza, in order to establish a “Best Practices” guideline list for the industry, the committee will “look to other industries that are ahead of the hotel industry in terms of e-business initiatives such as retail and banking to find out what things have worked best in these industries in order to create and adapt them to apply to our own.”
Finally, the new committee will seek to create e-procurement models and customer relationship management guidelines for the industry. Nardozza says that it is important to help businesses understand the difference between the various procurement solutions provided by companies like Zoho, Avendra, GoCo-op and others.
“We will be looking to both Universities for support on some of these initiatives and the aggregate wisdom of the committee. We will also actively seek out similar committees representing other industries to try to participate in their meetings to see what we can learn,” said Nardozza. (3/23/01) Kelly Wayne