Early adopters of cutting-edge technology are more the exception than the norm in the hospitality industry.
That’s why many hoteliers have been slow to transition to the cloud and roll out new innovations. They have also been among the hardest hit by the global COVID-19 pandemic.
But once this crisis passes, borders start opening, and fears of social contact subside, travelers are likely to start filling hotel rooms in record numbers, taking the vacations that they unexpectedly put on hold. Many of them will arrive at their destinations with expectations that have been reshaped by a year in lockdown.
Oracle Hospitality is committed to helping our customers meet those expectations. That means helping a risk-averse industry to rapidly modernize by empowering partners who are building cutting-edge hospitality solutions.
We’re doing that by making the REST API specifications in the Oracle Hospitality Integration Platform (OHIP) freely accessible through GitHub under the Universal Permissive License (UPL) model. Such game-changing interfaces will allow software developers—whether they’re promising startups or innovators from other industries—to rapidly and cost effectively build integrations for Oracle Hospitality OPERA Cloud Property Management, Oracle’s next-gen hotel PMS platform.
The new REST APIs, available in the Oracle Hospitality Integration Platform (OHIP) and governed under the Universal Permissive License (UPL), allow those partners to reuse, reference, or contribute to the API specs. Partners also benefit from the many samples showing how to accomplish contactless use cases such as check-in/check-out. That’s a much-needed step toward nurturing an ecosystem that empowers hotels to meet post-pandemic challenges.
COVID-19 has changed how many of us procure goods and services—and some things won’t change back. Consumers now routinely expect the option of using their smartphones for frictionless shopping, scheduling, and support.
As hoteliers regain business momentum, they’ll need to satisfy guests’ new preferences such as: contactless check-ins, mobile-enabled amenities, chatbot assistance, keyless entries, concerted scheduling and billing services, and many other partner-developed solutions.
In the past, integrating third-party features into a PMS could prove to be challenging and expensive. But the cloud addresses interoperability issues, and the new protocols can make it much easier to connect OPERA Cloud to a larger ecosystem, helping to bring down costs and accelerating speed to market.
Oracle’s dedication to innovating on this front extends to our business model as well.
OPERA Cloud allows unlimited third-party integrations at no extra cost. Instead, partners are charged on a consumption basis by the number of API calls they make—the more business directed to them through Oracle’s platform, the more they pay.
A software vendor can self-register to access the OHIP developer portal, discover all the REST APIs, test and register their applications, then, once they secure business from the hotel, launch an automated provisioning process. It’s a truly open architecture for the property management system, the heartbeat of the hotel that draws inspiration from GitHub, the open source code repository through which the API specifications and our postman collections are now freely accessible.
Of the 40,000 hotels around the world that manage their properties with OPERA PMS, many have already transitioned to OPERA Cloud and are reaping the benefits. Many more are headed in that direction, and the post-pandemic reality only creates greater urgency to transition.
As those businesses migrate to cloud, Oracle hopes the open APIs will spur innovation by attracting new technology vendors, who’ll help hoteliers tackle the unique challenges of the moment.
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