<p><span class="p-body">Max Starkov has spent his entire professional career in hospitality and online travel, focusing on hospitality technology, digital transformation strategy and marketing. He teaches Current and Future Hospitality Technologies, an elective course in the MS in Global Hospitality Management at the Tisch Center of Hospitality.</span></p>

<p><span class="p-body">Starkov teaches Current and Future Technologies at NYU SPS. In it, he teaches students about the business applications of hospitality technologies. The objective of the course is not to teach students to become IT specialists or software engineers, but to educate them to become technologists. They’ll be experts on how to understand, evaluate, choose, implement and manage technology applications in hospitality.</span></p> <p><span class="p-body">According to Starkov, the digital transformation is changing hospitality at an unprecedented pace and hoteliers are caught largely unprepared. Today's travel consumers have become even more digitally-savvy than ever. In fact, hospitality is becoming a 100% digital technology-enabled industry powered by online, mobile, cloud, IoT, AI, robotics, and blockchain tools and applications.</span></p> <p><span class="p-body">&quot;Digital technology is making its way into every aspect of the industry: hotel operations, guest services, communications, revenue management, distribution, CRM and marketing,&quot; he explained. In the near to mid-term, any full-service [three, four, or five-star] hotel will need over 100 plus APIs (application programming interface) with third-party tech applications and solutions to be able to function and meet the basic needs and wants of today's tech-savvy travelers.&quot;</span></p>

<p><span class="p-body">Starkov hopes to provoke his students into thinking outside the box. For example, is hospitality a real-estate industry? Traditionally, for lending purposes, there are six commonly defined sectors of commercial real estate. These categories are office, retail, industrial, multifamily, hotel, and special purpose. Hotels are considered non-core real estate investments characterized either as value-added or opportunistic real estate from both the equity investor and lender perspectives.</span></p> <p><span class="p-body">Why is this question important? Well, by Starkov's summation, this classification creates the wrong mindset among many hotel owners and operators who operate the properties like real estate businesses, completely ignoring the realities of the marketplace and the rapidly changing preferences of the tech-savvy travel consumers.</span></p> <p><span class="p-body">&quot;Any hotel operates within the physical confines of a real-estate asset, but so do retail stores, colleges, hospitals, manufacturing, etc,&quot; he explained. &quot;Do you consider Target, which owns most of its stores, a real-estate company? Do you consider Amazon a real estate company, since it leases or owns more than 160 million sq. ft. of warehouses out of which the company conducts a big chunk of its business? Or Tesla with its eight company-owned gigafactory manufacturing plants? Of course not. In my view, hospitality has already become a technology-enabled service industry, not a real estate industry.&quot;</span></p> <p><span class="p-body">Students who take Current and Future Technologies will be well prepared to become these future tech-savvy leaders and managers and gain crucial competitive advantage in their career pursuits.</span></p>

<p><span class="p-body">Starkov says that next-gen technologies like AI, robotics, automation, mobility and IoT are called upon to solve a number of issues in our industry, such as labor shortages, turnover rates, labor costs and productivity issues.</span></p> <p><span class="p-body">&quot;Unfortunately, our industry is vastly unprepared for this new digital reality. Most hotels are desperately lagging behind the technology—devices, amenities, mobile and cloud services—customers enjoy at their own homes,&quot; he said. &quot;Long gone are the days when staying at a hotel meant experiencing better technology and amenities (flat-screen TV? HBO? High-Speed Internet?) compared to the guests' own homes. Unfortunately, many hotels nowadays offer a ‘sub-par home away from home’ experience as far as technology is concerned.&quot;</span></p> <p><span class="p-body">The main reason for the big gap in hospitality's technology preparedness and customer tech expectations is the systemic underinvestment in technology due to deeply-rooted tech aversion in our industry. Another important factor that is accelerating the adoption of technology in hospitality: acute labor shortages and rapidly rising labor costs.So what are the solutions? Changing the business model, hiring more gig workers to do the job, streamlining operations are some of the immediate temporary measures. &quot;But the only long-term solution is investing in technology that can solve the current labor shortages through innovations, automation, mobility, robotization and next gen technology applications,&quot; he concluded.</span></p> <p><span class="p-body">An <a href="/content/sps-nyu/explore/degrees-and-programs/ms-in-global-hospitality-management.html" title="MS in Global Hospitality Management">MS in Global Hospitality Management</a> from NYU SPS can open doors that may have never imagined were possible. See where you can start the next chapter of your career with a degree from the Jonathan M. Tisch Center of Hospitality.</span></p>