It helps improve our guest experience.”
Wong faced some challenges in
making sure that the benefits of digital
transformation were understood
throughout the organisation. “It’s very
hard to show an immediate return on
investment with IT systems – it’s different
from selling rooms,” says Wong. “If I sell
a room at $200 and my cost is $100,
my ROI is $100. It takes a long time to
realise the value of putting, say, $1mn
into an IT system.” Wong is clear that
such investments do bear fruit, even if
their effect is not immediately obvious.
It can be the case, however, that some
solutions are prohibitively expensive,
especially to a company based in
Southeast Asia and at the mercy of
currency fluctuations. “When it comes
to Malaysia, for example, the cost is
four times more than it is in America
once you factor in forex rates. This puts
some things out of our reach. Based on
the challenges that we have dealing
with vendors in terms of cost, we have
evaluated the cost of hiring developers
in Asia, developing a system and getting
it up and running and it would still be
cheaper than buying from Europe,” he
comments. “We would love to look into103http://www.gigabitmagazine.com