The impact of Covid has been particularly acute for the hospitality and allied sectors such as restaurants and holiday rentals. As the new normal sets in, the adoption of digital platforms in facilitating recovery in these businesses is witnessing an accelerated growth.  Cyprus’s economy is dominated by micro small and medium businesses (MSMBs) many of which are engaged in hospitality-related activities. The overall competitiveness and wellbeing of this sector which has been strongly impacted by Covid-19 is key to ensure sustainable socio-economic growth by way of generating tourism Euros and employment opportunities.  The role of digital platforms and technologies hitherto focussed on guest convenience and business efficiency has now expanded to enabling guest safety and hygiene protocols for the businesses in the post-Covid era. High tech-No touch is the new mantra that will ensure long term viability of hospitality and restaurant businesses by instilling confidence in guests to make an informed choice without compromising health and safety. Putting it into perspective, digital disruption on the back on Industry 4.0 is an inherent change in how businesses are able to deliver value to their customers. In addition to leveraging the opportunities of a mix of innovative digital tools for staying ahead of the curve in a hyper-competitive and hyper-personalized environment, Industry 4.0 solutions such as Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain and Internet of Things will now become part of this mix for providing a non-negotiable layer of safety and hygiene in the post-Covid era. In practical terms, Cyprus’s hospitality and tourism-related businesses will need to embark on a familiarization drive with the eventual objective of adopting these technologies to ensure business continuity and thus continue to strengthen Cyprus’s service-driven economy.

The primary target segments for this seminar are the private sector owners, managers and supervisory staff of micro, small and medium businesses in the hospitality and tourism sector including the sub-verticals comprising of bars, cafés, car rentals, event organisers, hotels, holiday rentals, tour operators and travel agents.

The key takeaway from the seminar for the participants’ benefit will be the ability to effectively leverage the Industry 4.0 platforms for rejuvenating driving value in their day-to-day operations. 

Particularly, this expert seminar will offer valuable insight to industry stakeholders who deal with administration, revenue and marketing operations.  

In the post Covid-19 scenario, high tech-no touch technologies have assumed critical importance for the survival of businesses. In this context, the high level objectives of this expert seminar are to enable owners, operators and managers of MSMBs in the hospitality and allied sectors to (i) gain general understanding of Industry 4.0 platforms (ii) evaluate the suitability of specific technologies for deployment.

The specific objectives pertaining to knowledge, skills and attitude are as follows:

Knowledge related objectives

• Recognize the need to familiarize with Industry 4.0 platforms.
• Identify the suite of platforms best suited for line of business.
• Analyze the resource implications and financial impact of deploying these platforms.
• Revise existing standard operating procedures in line with the adopted platforms.

Skills related objectives

• Use evaluation templates for assessing best-fit technologies.
• Operate cloud-based platforms for capturing and analyzing guest sentiment data with live dashboards.
• Chart real-time asset sanitizing protocols with agile cloud-based PMS tools.

Attitude related objectives

• Adopt the right attitudes about the importance of Industry 4.0 tools.
• Advocate a future thinking culture among internal stakeholders of the business.

Recommend the right culture in the organization that will build and support confidence to self-manage critical digital assets, independent of third-party agents