The breakout of the Covid-19 pandemic unarguably has drastically changed the living conditions of people. In Nigeria and the world at large, the pandemic has ultimately compelled people to work from home, stay away from hotels, and when necessary, hold virtual meetings since the virus does not allow for physical gatherings.
In addition, the pandemic also resulted in the absolute significance of digital communication and transformation to organizations. The hospitality industry has become one of such bodies transformed by the pandemic and by digital technologies.

The Hospitality Industry
The hospitality industry includes hotels, restaurants, clubs, entertaining apartments and beer parlours, among others. Today, the greatest challenge in the hospitality industry is, satisfying demanding customers. In the hospitality industry, the consumer is part of the actual consumption or purchasing process.
Digital transformation enhances the purchasing process. Digital technologies are necessary because the hospitality industry has evolved from individually owned and developed enterprises to public global industries. Success is measured by revenue per available customer and earnings per share. The industry and management strategies remain dynamic. Macro trends such as labour availability, new technologies, economic ups and downs, terrorism, security, and globalization, to name a few, are having and will continue to have a substantial impact on management strategies.
Challenges
Despite the reported benefits of digital transformation, only a few see it as an easy process to implement. Most companies struggle to receive clear-cut benefits from this process. Importantly while it was previously believed that the lack of technological knowledge and the prevalence of legacy systems was the common obstacle to successful digital transformation, recent literature supports the idea that the problem is often in the lack of leadership for this kind of transformation. Indeed, in many cases, companies where technology is not an issue still report challenges in digitalization. Many organizations commit a common mistake by investing large sums of money and deploying digital technologies as soon as possible. This often leads to the lack of effort coordination and the absence of harmonious integration of technology throughout organizations. Similarly, failures in digital transformation are usually products of either deployment without coordination or the lack of involvement from organizational leaders.
More Challenges on Digital Transformation
In the digital economic era, small hospitality businesses struggle to compete in a rapidly changing and dynamic market. During the Covid-19 crisis, digital transformation became a necessary tool for small hospitality businesses to improve their business performance. However, having limited resources and capabilities posed threats and barriers. Many people have decreed that the roles of government in digital transformation are very crucial. Digital transformation has become a new approach for many firms to sell their products. Many studies have been conducted on the roles of government in digital transformation but in Nigeria, the government has played many roles in creating policies, programmes and rules that help small businesses deal with their limited resources and inadequate capabilities.
In the hospitality industry, little effort has been done. Many have also suggested that government still has many roles to play; for example, the government can develop and strengthen policies and programmes to support hospitality businesses and digital transformation agendas by creating specific policies, support and counselling initiatives, customized training programmes, and a collaboration ecosystem. Through these, hospitality enterprises will be able to improve their business performance, increase productivity, and achieve business growth through digital transformation by adopting other digital platforms’ services, increasing their capabilities, and obtaining government support.
Role of Government
The rapid pace of technology evolution over the past decades changes the business models at the leadership level. An unprecedented level of global connectivity has created the need for enormous volumes of data. The domain of intelligence agencies, market research professionals and some technical statisticians is now going mainstream. The government needs to review a vast number of laws and regulations as a way of enforcing privacy regulations and protecting against data breaches, to regulations that ensure net neutrality and data flows. This is because the future of the hospitality industry is based on the assumption that the internet will remain a series of open networks through which data flows. The government also needs to improve their capabilities when it comes to citizen engagement; to effectively and actively engage with both providers and users. The government needs to attract and retain the talent needed for the data age industry.
Prospects, and Roles of the Enterprise
The hospitality industry is growing at a rapid rate and is being described as the new oil. Digital technologies are leading to a radical change in citizen expectations. This means that the value of data may go up every day. Companies such as Google, Facebook and Microsoft are using all related techniques to train computers to recognize objects in photos and understand language. Data is becoming a source of wealth and public value creation. In that context, one can argue that it is more valuable than oil. Based on this view, the government needs to build a digital platform for small services businesses such as hotels, restaurants, amusement parks, entertainment centres and lodging apartments. It also needs to promote digital training, build a digital collaborations ecosystem and innovation pathway.
The government needs to design and implement policies that facilitate development by organizing actions together with the information, education, and collaboration activities that will enable the other actions such as commercial decisions and innovations.
Moreover…
They need to play a crucial role in verifying, maintaining up-to-date and unable data for hospitality services. The Federal government is seen by people as a platform for enabling the creation of public value hospitality is at the heart of this platform that will give the public and the hospitality industry richer, immersive web-based services.
The Role of Digital Transformation
For transformation, the hospitality enterprise must respond to the challenges of globalization and urbanization of economic activities. Enterprises must modernize by integrating their activities with a new digital ecosystem. Furthermore, organizations should have an opportunity to develop solutions to complex problems through digital transformation. To succeed in digitalization, and in addition to applying the framework, an organization must have digital readiness, the desire and willingness to implement digital technologies and create innovation to achieve its objectives. To succeed in digital transformation, organizations must increase their digital transformation capacity, increase team member skills, be involved in continuous learning, form a team, and can work with virtual workforce technologies and tools, such as cloud services, mobile apps, documents collaboration and so forth, that gives employees the ability to work remotely from anywhere but remain connected to a collaborative team. Covid-19 crisis has changed hospitality customers’ behaviour in recent times.
Hospitality enterprises must immune their strategies to keep customers loyal. Hospitality organizations must respond to customers’ present demands and expectations and be proactive to address customers’ future needs even before they realize them. Firms with superior capability should redesign and rethink existing business processes while adopting digital transformation. By embracing digital technology, hospitality businesses will have a modern look and relevancy, change customers values, behaviour and needs and indirectly force organizations to improve their performance.
References
Fadipe, S.A. (2014) Tourism Destination Management. A guild for policymakers and destination managers, Prince of prints Ltd., Lagos, Nigeria.
Filzgerald M. Krushwitz N. Bonnet, D and Welch (2017) in Waleed, A. (2015). The role of strategic leadership in the digital transformation process. IJRRAS 33201
Waleed, A. (2015). The role of strategic leadership in the digital transformation process, www.arpapress.com/Volumes/Vol33Issue2/IJRRAS_33_2_01.pdf.
Westerman, G., Bonnet, D., McAfee, A., (2014). Leading digital: turning technology into business transformation, Cambridge, MS: Harvard Business Press.
Yasar, J. (2017). Role of government in digital transformation hull international business school.