Why You Should Consider Hiring Onsite IT Personnel

In our digitally advanced world, it’s a given that there will be technological issues that will impact the experience guests have when they enter your building. It might be an older person who isn’t quite sure how to get on hotel Wi-Fi. You might run into an issue where a family has multiple devices or wants to stream and cannot.

In any case, you and other leaders should consider the extent to which you need onsite IT personnel since many places will contract with a third party instead. When that’s the case, representatives from that third party will come to your hotel if and when there is an IT or infrastructure issue.

Why onsite IT is important

Information technology is especially important given all the processes a modern hotel undertakes on a daily basis. With the growth of the Internet comes bad actors, and many would posit that having onsite IT personnel means they can more appropriately plan for what the hotel needs. As you might expect, that includes working preemptively to keep threats away and going on the offensive if and when something goes wrong with a given system.

Things happen, and you can’t predict when there will be some kind of mistake that rankles a guest. You don’t have to have IT staff available at every hour of the day like some hotels do with front-desk staff. What you do want is the ability to take care of a computer or wifi issue when a guest has one. If I am on a work trip but can no longer answer my email as quickly as I want or take work calls, my experience as a guest may be irreparably damaged. You should keep that bad taste out of a guest’s mouth if you can.

The downside of third-party IT teams

Third parties can make for issues because of logistics and other concerns. Let’s say a company contracts with multiple properties, and when you need them for an emergency, the time it takes for their staff to come is much longer than you would prefer. Onsite IT staff eliminate almost all of the guesswork, and they have a certain allegiance — if you will — to your hotel that pinch hitters would not.

Instead of depending on a separate business that might raise its prices or undertake other actions that you would not like, bring those folks into a house where you can have much more control over what they do when they do it and what exactly they should be focusing on. That’s helpful, especially as you see how often entities leave themselves open to being hacked. Considering how quickly those same bad actors can bring a business to its knees is sobering.

In the event of a hack, onsite IT personnel can get right to work and take the responsibility of alerting the authorities once the smoke has cleared. A third party is a black box of sorts since you don’t know what their policies are or what they might be considering in making them. Perhaps a company is willing to cut corners with security in what you’re uncomfortable with.

To the extent that you have to honor a signed contract with that vendor, you are, in some ways, at the mercy of a company that you can’t possibly know intimately. That would give any business leader an immediate cause for pause, and it may be apt to consider how even minute factors impact your guests’ experience now and in the future.