Sipa's collaborative commerce project

How IT can help hotels offer more

Bangkok Post May 2005 -- Front Page Database
Sipa's collaborative commerce project also helps hotels earn more revenue
Story by KARNJANA KARNJANATAWE

Nahathai Tangkittivutikul, the owner of Baan Nam Ping resort,
demonstrates Internet surfing via the IP TV service of Samart
Telecoms. --- KARNJANA KARNJANATAWE

An innovative project will offer new hotel services for guests, including television and video on demand, as well as enabling hotels to earn more revenue by providing additional services to their guests.

Called collaborative commerce (c-commerce), this project that is spearheaded by the Software Industry Promotion Agency (Sipa) will allow guests to make bookings online from their hotel rooms or do e-shopping, as well as providing a wide range of digital content.

Hotels, on the other hand, can be a one-stop agent to provide e-ticket bookings, car rental services and make reservations elsewhere for their guests so that they can earn more revenue.

Sipa has signed up 17 partners including hotels, tourism-related businesses, the Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT), telecom operators and IT developers.

The cluster has the aim of stimulating more spending by tourists by providing them with one-stop information and services during their hotel stay. It will also help to expand the software industry here, said Sipa president Manoo Ordeedolchest.

"The project will take an advantage of ICT to build value for those in the tourism industry," he said.

Started a year ago under the low-cost software policy of former ICT Minister Dr Surapong Suebwonglee, Sipa outlined the idea and kicked off the project with 10 pilot sites in Chiang Mai this April.

Sipa has set aside a budget of seven million baht for a one-year pilot test.

"This project is different from other e-commerce projects in terms of collaboration, which allows participants to create new service packages for their customers and to earn more with less investment," said Manoo.

Nahathai Tangkittivutikul, who is the owner of Baan Nam Ping, a boutique hotel in Chiang Mai and one of the pilot sites, said her resort would get a boost with the help of the government. Baan Nam Ping, part of a luxury boutique hotel group called Hotel de Charm (www.hoteldecharm.net) located in three rai of land near the Ping River in Saraphi district, will soon have an IP TV service.

This will provide tourism information to be sponsored by TAT, an e-catalogue of local services and products as well as Internet service in its guest rooms.

"The service will be convenient for our customers, who are mostly business people here for nature and the scenery but who can still keep in touch with their families or search for other places to travel to or buy things during their stay," she said.

TAT Northern Office director Junnapong Saranak said the TAT aimed to increase tourism spending by 10% this year. He said ICT would help enhance business efficiency while opening up more marketing channels for SMEs.

Last year, Chiang Mai had 3.89 million visitors, up by 14.6% over the year before. TAT expects visitors to increase to 4.2 million, with a total spending of 48,000 million baht.

"On average, a tourist spends 3,028 baht a day and stays four days in Chiang Mai," he said, noting that while the TAT planned to promote new travel packages and places such as the Night Safari, it also helped by promoting ICT to hotels, guesthouse owners and to spa providers by encouraging them to have web sites and to learn about business-to-business e-commerce.

The TAT plans to promote the c-commerce project with more focussed group workshops, said TAT executive director for IT Sansern Ngaorungsi.

It expects that some 30% of hotels will join the project, he said.

The basic requirement of the c-commerce project would be to have broadband Internet connections and online reservations, said Manoo.

"This project would have been almost impossible in the past because broadband Internet was not popular then," he said.

To introduce the tourism c-commerce project, Sipa set up three implementation phases.

The first step was a portal site to promote products and services. Sipa identified Samart Telcoms as an infrastructure partner to provide an IP datacasting solution. Samart will also act as a content aggregator and will host catalogues and broadcast information over its IP TV system.

This would be a "pushed e-catalogue' platform, said Samart assistant vice president Chutipone Sivhaporn.

It has partnered with Sat-Ed, an e-learning solution provider from Canada, and International Datacasting from Singapore to offer the IP datacasting solution and will use the iPSTAR service of Shin Satellite.

Samart will manage and store digital information on its centralised servers before encrypting and compressing the data for broadcasting.

The content can be selected to be relevant to a business while information can be delivered through IP TVs, touchscreen kiosks or computers, he said.

A hotel can keep its information up-to-date and pay for service on a monthly basis, said Mr Chutipone. "It is a cheap way to broadcast its service to various destinations, especially to where a wired service is not provided. Even different types of information can be concurrently broadcast to different locations, such as dataset 1 for hotels in the North and dataset 2 for those in the South," he said.

Hotels could have more services such as entertainment on-demand, Internet access or e-learning, said Sat-Ed CEO John Hawker. The IP TV programming is operated by a remote control and guests can also forward, pause or rewind information or entertainment, just as they can with a DVD player, he said.

In addition, other relevant businesses such as OTOP product owners can show their manufacturing processes and furnished products directly to guests.

"Our solution also supports Internet access via TV with a high-speed link so that guests can access the Internet in their rooms," he said.

Tanit Chumsang, executive director of The Good View, a bar and restaurant with branches in both Chiang Mai and Bangkok, said he had just learned how to save marketing costs after learning about the c-commerce project from Sipa.

"Sipa gives us a short-cut to move to an e-marketing world," he said, noting that its golf and resort business was already computerized through services of Commerce Net and that he planned to implement 70 units of IP TV in hotel rooms at Gassan Khuntan Golf and Resort.

The second step of the tourism c-commerce project will be to add a booking engine.

Sipa president Manoo said the process would expand the services of hotels to allow them to be tour agents or ticket agents while it would also help increase the number of customers for travel agents.

For example, a hotel in Chiang Mai could help its guests to book a room at a hotel in Phuket and get a commission fee, he said, noting that although they were not part of the same hotel chain, they could recommend rooms and make reservations and that would increase customer satisfaction.

M.L. Chanchot Jombunud, the owner of Phi Phi Natural Resort and two hotels in Bangkok, said the project would definitely benefit his business.

"The challenge is to have full room bookings while the high season for Phi Phi Island is only four months," he said, adding that the project would not only reduce his marketing costs, but also provide the opportunity to generate more income.

The hotel plans to computerize its back-office to support on-line reservations and hotel management this month.

In this process, Sipa selects various parties to offer a one-stop booking solution such as Sabai2Go.com, which offer a tourism e-marketplace including e-booking for hotels, flights and spa. It also provides e-payments, with a 30-baht transaction fee.

Other providers are AI Soft, which provides an Internet booking service to more than 700 airlines, 50,000 hotels, and 29,000 locations for 50 car rental companies; Commerce Net (Thailand), offering an e-hotel solution; Matrix Traveller, which provides e-booking to 3,000 travel agents, e-marketing and a Japanese language call centre service; Infotronics, which has provided e-marketing and CRM solutions for five years; and broadband provider True, which also offers a Japanese-language CRM service.

The third step and ultimate goal of this tourism c-commerce project is to have a web services infrastructure and Sipa has won support for this from Microsoft and IBM, said Manoo.

"Microsoft will donate the software platform and two engineers to develop a web service engine in Chiang Mai while IBM will provide two-years of sponsorship for the project and will develop another web-service engine at Sipa's headquarters in Bangkok," he said.

Sipa expects to launch the web service by July and it expects to have a new web site to link all participants "under one roof" soon.

The site name might be ThaiTourismCCommerce.net, he said, noting that all participants such as hotels, golf courses, spas and tour agents will be registered with the site for easier searching by visitors. Then the information will be broadcast to guestrooms via IP TV, while the web-service core engine could also linked to third-party call centres and CRM services, he noted.

"Sipa has given an outline of the software architecture, has sorted out the ICT service providers and built up partnerships with the hotels to join the project," said Mr Manoo, adding that it aims to gain 100 participants and partners within the next two months and will promote the project throughout the country.

The next targets are hotels in Phuket, Pattaya and guest houses on Khao San road, said the Sipa president, adding that if the project was successful, it could generate some 100 million baht in revenue for the software industry.