Hospitality: Taj Hotels - Taking the Lead

The Taj Hotels and Resorts and Palaces, one of India's premier
hotel groups, opened its first hotel in Mumbai in 1903. The group includes 57
hotels in 40 locations across India and 18 international hotels.

For standardizing disparate policies and processes existed in
individual hotels, the group four years ago "realized that growth goes hand
in hand with customer satisfaction." This only paved the way for free
information interchange between the geographically disparate units believes,
Prakash Shukla, senior VP, Technology and CIO, Taj Hotels.

As a 104-year-old company, IT systems started off with cash
registers and standalone POS systems with the first PCs introduced in 1978-79 in
back-office with home grown applications for the property management system. The
IT system in Taj can be broadly classified into two categories: Hotel or
Property systems locally installed in each hotel and centralized systems for
global information exchange.

	"The administration and guest networks are absolutely separate. This is for security and privacy of data"
	-Prakash Shukla, senior VP, Technology and CIO, Taj Hotels

Most of the Taj hotels are 802.11b/g Wi-Fi enabled and guests
can check mails and perform their business right from the hotel premises with
firewalls and routes securing the network against external threats. "It may
be noted that the administration and guest networks are absolutely separate.
This is for security and privacy of data," adds Shukla.

As the backbone of any hotel, Property Management System (PMS)
is a mission critical system, capable of handling several transactions
concurrently. In the Taj Group, redundant servers in the IT room host the PMS
application. The PMS eases the billing for guests when they use any service for
instance telephone communication, room dining etc. Even reservations or
cancellations are updated in real-time to allow the staff to get a real picture
of the room status at any time. The bills for services rendered to the guest are
updated either automatically (by telephone calls) or manually (by use of WiFi
prepayment) in PMS with the guests paying a single itemized bill upon checkout.

The group also has a data center in Mumbai that host's high
availability servers and network systems that allow exchange of information in
real-time and group entity to access data in real time.

The corporate offices and hotels are connected by a WAN through
leased lines with ISDN or smaller bandwidth leased lines as backup, while
international hotels connect to the data center through VPN secure channels.

The data center hosts applications, which are globally accessed,
including the Central Reservation System and CRM, which manages the frequent
guest program and Customer Feedback System.

In the Pipeline

Recognizing that wireless networking is the way to the future, Taj has
implemented some technologies for taking advantage of the wire free world.
"Mobile POS terminals are carried by mini bar staff to post the items
consumed directly to the PMS system through the WiFi network," Shukla said.
More mobile technology systems like mobile check in and RFID recognition are in
the pipeline, he added. The group is also in the process of phasing out the
Novell NetWare environment to the Windows Server 2003 OS.

The Taj Group also has plans lined up for implementing IP
telephony in its network by "installing IP based exchanges, but the roll
over would have to wait until hotel applications are built on this
technology".

Stuti Das

stutid@cybermedia.co.in