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This month Hotelier Middle East talks to IT managers from across the region to discover the latest trends and the challenges they are facing.

What are the main challenges you face as an IT manager in the hospitality sector?

Fraidy Pinto: Rapid advances in technology requires IT Managers to keep up with hotel applications and guest services technology. Today's IT Managers need to understand more about networks, security and policies than merely focusing on back-office applications like Property Management Systems (PMS) and Point of Sales Systems (POS).

The challenge is to keep up with advances in technology, which in turn can also be looked upon as an opportunity to provide enhanced IT services to guests and hotel administration.

Khalid Omari: Day-to-day challenges in the hospitality IT sector include retaining trained and skilled staff. Jobs in the hospitality IT sector are affected by the seasonal tourism fluctuations and economy.

During the peak of the tourist season this industry requires high staff turnover, but then it could be a major financial drain during the off-season. The other major challenge is ensuring data security, which is common to the whole IT industry.

Mahmoud Kamal: I would have to say that one of the main challenges is in exceeding our guests' expectation of fast internet bandwidth.

Another challenge is in ensuring that your in-room technological facilities are updated as modern-day tech-savvy guests will be expecting more than just the bare minimum.

For a city hotel especially, they will come to expect items such as WiFi, iPod connectivity stations, flat-screen televisions, multi-function systems and touch-screen technology.

A third challenge we face is in ensuring that the latest anti-virus software and firewall systems are in place as there are always new threats and spyware programmes being generated daily.

Khodor Kazem: Although it seems that technology gets easier and easier to use every year, for lots of people technology is still an unknown entity and this creates a digital divide, especially between team members.

Another critical challenge to our business is how to protect our data from any number of internal and external threats. We have to ensure our data is protected as much as possible to make sure nothing can affect our operations.

And finally another issue is that of integration. As the business grows, it's absolutely essential that we ensure our business's data is integrated as much as possible. Our inventory, sales data and marketing information need to be linked together to best serve our customers and increase our profitability.

For example there are some people that are using Microsoft Excel to store critical facts and figures and some are using PDAs and Microsoft Outlook to store customer information, so integration between different applications is a key factor in this process.

What systems do you run, and how do these integrate between a property and corporate level of the business?

Pinto: Most of our hotels run Oracle based OPERA, which combines the functionality of PMS, sales, catering and accounts receivable, therefore integration is less of an issue.

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