University of Colombo

Faculty of Arts

Department of Economics
Postgraduate Diploma in Tourism Economics
and Hotel Management (Pg. DTEHM)

2011/12

Extended Essay

Contribution of ICT Development for Front-Office

Operation of Hotel Industry: Special Reference to
Language Barriers Occurs in Reception Services

Name

: Palpolage Don Charitha Gunathilake

Index No

: 2011/PGDTEHM/04

Contribution of ICT Development for Front-Office Operation of Hotel Industry

Name: Mr. Palpolage Don Charitha Gunathilake
Index No: 2011/PGDTEHM/04
Topic of the Study: Contribution of ICT Development for Front-Office Operation of
Hotel Industry: Special Reference to Language Barriers Occurs in Reception
Services
Name of the supervisor: Mr. Udana Wickramasinghe

Authenticity statement:
I, P.D.C. Gunathilake following Postgraduate Diploma in Tourism Economics and
Hotel Management at the Department of Economics, the University of Colombo,
Colombo, Sri Lanka declare that when writing my thesis on the topic of Contribution
of ICT Development for Front-Office Operation of Hotel Industry: Special Reference
to Language Barriers Occurs in Reception Services I will not commit plagiarism. This
extended essay is my own work. I am well aware of University of Colombos policies
on plagiarism and I certify that the content of this thesis is all my own work and does
not contain any unacknowledged content from other sources.
Moreover, I declare that I will, at all times, remain responsible for the above.

Student signature:

Date of the Submission: 08th of September, 2013

Signature of the supervisor:

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Contribution of ICT Development for Front-Office Operation of Hotel Industry

Acknowledgement

I wish to acknowledge and thank the following people gratefully who supported and
guided me in many ways to make this project a success.
The primary acknowledgement of this project goes to Dr. Suranga de Silva, the
course director of the Pg. Diploma in Tourism Economics and Hotel Management for
her kind advice throughout my academic period.
Also I wish to express my heartfelt gratitude to my dear supervisor Mr. Udana
Wickramasinghe for giving me guidance in time to time and supporting me by giving
a great moral support to achieve the project goals. I would also give my kind regards
to Dr. Sepali Subasinghe for the great guidance provided me on writing extended
essay.
Also, I would like to thank and give my honorable gratitude to Department of
Economics of Colombo University to providing me library facilities and laboratory
facilities which helped me a lot to come up with a more effective report.
I warmly thank all the industry personnel and tourist help me given their experiences
and ideas on this topic.
So, I promise that I have learnt many things from this project while managing the
time and priorities given to me.

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Contribution of ICT Development for Front-Office Operation of Hotel Industry

Abstract

Hotels cater for the foreigners came from the all over the world. Foreigners are
speaking their own languages. When guests come to Hotel Reception, guests will
not be able to communicate using the global language English. Sometimes, there
might be a receptionist that who can understand the language that guest speaks.
But, lots of times, guests will be highly unsatisfied when there is no one to handles
his/her inquires. Therefore, this causes problems in the reception, when guests from
different nationalities come to hotel.
Information Communication Technology (ICT) provides support in language
problems rises when communicating with the people of different nationalities. The
objective of this project is to identify the solutions given by ICT and analysis the
applicability of them in the problem mention above and to explore the portability of
the extensors of this project into real time system.
This will only look at the ICT solutions which can be given using available computer
hardware at the hotel reception or with slight modification of computer hardware.
This will be focus on English, German, French, and Russian which are the
languages speaks in the top ten tourist generating countries to Sri Lanka.
The information will be gathering by conducting a literature review on areas of
language translation, voice translation and speech recognition. Interviewing of key
informants like front office staff will be the way of identifying the language problems
occurs at reception.
This research would outcomes the applicability of available ICT solutions of
language translation with respect to handle the language problem rises at the hotel
reception.

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Contribution of ICT Development for Front-Office Operation of Hotel Industry

Table of Content

Acknowledgement ...................................................................................................... iii

Abstract ......................................................................................................................iv
Table of Content......................................................................................................... v
List of Tables ..............................................................................................................vi
Chapter 1 Introduction ............................................................................................. 1
1.1

Problem Statement ....................................................................................... 1

1.2

Scope ............................................................................................................ 2

1.3

Significant of Studies..................................................................................... 2

1.4

Objectives ..................................................................................................... 2

1.5

Chapter Breakdown ...................................................................................... 3

Chapter 2 - Literature Review .................................................................................... 4

2.1 Relevant Concepts, Definitions and Words ...................................................... 4
2.3 Relevant Studies............................................................................................... 8
Chapter 3 - Methodology .......................................................................................... 15
Chapter 4 - Research Findings ................................................................................ 17
Chapter 5 - Conclusion & Recommendations .......................................................... 18
Bibliography ............................................................................................................. 19

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Contribution of ICT Development for Front-Office Operation of Hotel Industry

List of Tables
Table 1. 1: Rule Based MT vs. Statistical MT............................................................. 6
Table 1. 2: Language of Speaking Top ten tourist arrivals to Sri Lanka ................ 14
Table 1. 3: Language of Speaking Emerging Tourist generating countries ........... 14
Table 1. 4: World mostly using languages................................................................ 14

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Chapter 1 Introduction
Tourism is an industry that sells intangible experiences. Communication is vital to the
success of tourism businesses since it is only through the effective use of
communication that tourism marketers can offer to customers tangible cues about
those intangible experiences. Also, while communication is an essential component
in the conduct of any service business, it has got an overarching role in tourism
(George, 2011). Contemporary information society has made Tourism a highly
information-intensive industry as ICT (Information and Communication Technologies)
has a potential impact on tourism business. The role of ICT in tourism industry
cannot be undervalued and it is crucial driving force in the current information driven
society. It has provided new tools and enabled new distribution channels, thus
creating a new business environment (Shanker, 2008). This research is about
contribution of new ICT development in recent years to tourism sector specially
referring to front-office operation of hotel industry. Mainly, focus on ICT development
in the field of natural language translation and machine translation (MT) which will
help to address communication barriers occurs due to various speaking languages in
the world.

1.1 Problem Statement

English is the official language of only seven countries. According to the World
Factbook, 2009 published by CIA (Central Investigation Agency) there are an
estimated 7,100 languages spoken in the world. English is natively speaks by only
4.83% of world population (CIA, 2009). While many tourists around the world speak
English as a second language, most prefer to communicate in their native tongue.
Hotels accommodate the foreigners arrive from the all over the world. All of them are
not fluent in English; sometimes they might not speak English at all. Sometimes,
there might be a receptionist who can understand the language that guest speaks.
But, lots of times, guests will be extremely unsatisfied when there are no people to
understand and help them in the reception. Therefore, this causes problems in the
reception, when guests from different nationalities come to hotel. On the other hand,
its extremely costly to employing more than one or two receptionist to solve the
above matter especially to small and medium scale hotels.

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Contribution of ICT Development for Front-Office Operation of Hotel Industry

1.2 Scope
This will only look at the ICT solutions which can be given using available computer
hardware at the hotel reception or with slight modification of computer hardware.
This will be focus on English, German, French, and Russian which are the
languages speaks in the top ten tourist generating countries to Sri Lanka. This is
focusing on small and medium scale hotels in Sri Lanka.

1.3 Significant of Studies

At present tourism is booming in Sri Lanka due to the end of 30 years civil war,
therefore many number of tourist are coming at present and will come in near further.
Be competitive with the nearby Asian countries like India and Maldives, excellence
and quality of guest relations in hospitality industry of Sri Lanka must a key factor.
Therefore, if our hotels front office can cater for any nationality of guests coming
there will be a higher advantage. So, by implementing a language translation
facilities at it will cause a very high impact on guest satisfaction at first impression.

1.4 Objectives
ICT provides support in language problems rises when communicating with the
people of different nationalities. The objectives of this project are as follows:
1. Identify the solutions given by ICT in area of natural language translation.
2. Analysis the applicability of them in the problem mention above.
3. Explore the portability of the extensors of this project into real time system.

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Contribution of ICT Development for Front-Office Operation of Hotel Industry

1.5 Chapter Breakdown

Chapter 1 This chapter gives the overall details about the project including the
research problem, scope of the project and project objectives.
Chapter 2 This chapter will discuss the literature review carried out to under area
of natural language translation, area of language translation solutions and other
areas related to the research domain.
Chapter 3 This chapter will describe the methodologies follows to collect primary
and secondary research data.
Chapter 4 This chapter will discuss the analysis of the research facts which are
gain from the literature review. Also their applicability for this application is express in
this chapter.
Chapter

Depending

on

the

analysis,

recommendations are described in this chapter.

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the

overall

conclusion

and

Contribution of ICT Development for Front-Office Operation of Hotel Industry

Chapter 2 - Literature Review

This chapter describes the available and relevant concepts related to the natural
language translation or machine translation. This also describes the current
innovations and current ICT developments which will help to address above mention
research problem.

2.1 Relevant Concepts, Definitions and Words

Machine Translation
Sometimes referred to by the abbreviation MT is a sub-field of computational
linguistics that investigates the use of software to translate text or speech from
one natural language to another.
On a basic level, MT performs simple substitution of words in one natural language
for words in another, but that alone usually cannot produce a good translation of a
text, because recognition of whole phrases and their closest counterparts in the
target

language

is

needed.

Solving

this

problem

with corpus

and statistical techniques is a rapidly growing field that is leading to better

translations, handling differences in linguistic typology, translation of idioms, and the
isolation of anomalies (Albat, 2012).
To process any translation, human or automated, the meaning of a text in the
original (source) language must be fully restored in the target language, i.e. the
translation. While on the surface this seems straightforward, it is far more complex.
Translation is not a mere word-for-word substitution. A translator must interpret and
analyze all of the elements in the text and know how each word may influence
another. This requires extensive expertise in grammar, syntax (sentence structure),
semantics (meanings), etc., in the source and target languages, as well as familiarity
with each local region (SYSTRAN, 2013).
Human and machine translation each have their share of challenges. For example,
no two individual translators can produce identical translations of the same text in the
same language pair, and it may take several rounds of revisions to meet customer
satisfaction. But the greater challenge lies in how machine translation can produce
publishable quality translations (SYSTRAN, 2013).

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Contribution of ICT Development for Front-Office Operation of Hotel Industry

Rule-Based Machine Translation Technology
Rule-based machine translation relies on countless built-in linguistic rules and
millions of bilingual dictionaries for each language pair. The software parses text and
creates a transitional representation from which the text in the target language is
generated. This process requires extensive lexicons with morphological, syntactic,
and semantic information, and large sets of rules. The software uses these complex
rule sets and then transfers the grammatical structure of the source language into
the target language (SYSTRAN, 2013).
Translations are built on gigantic dictionaries and sophisticated linguistic rules. Users
can improve the out-of-the-box translation quality by adding their terminology into the
translation process. They create user-defined dictionaries which override the
system's default settings.
In most cases, there are two steps: an initial investment that significantly increases
the quality at a limited cost, and an ongoing investment to increase quality
incrementally. While rule-based MT brings companies to the quality threshold and
beyond, the quality improvement process may be long and expensive.
Statistical Machine Translation Technology
Statistical machine translation utilizes statistical translation models whose
parameters stem from the analysis of monolingual and bilingual corpora. Building
statistical translation models is a quick process, but the technology relies heavily on
existing multilingual corpora. A minimum of 2 million words for a specific domain and
even more for general language are required. Theoretically it is possible to reach the
quality threshold but most companies do not have such large amounts of existing
multilingual corpora to build the necessary translation models. Additionally, statistical
machine translation is CPU intensive and requires an extensive hardware
configuration to run translation models for average performance levels (SYSTRAN,
2013).

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Contribution of ICT Development for Front-Office Operation of Hotel Industry

Rule-Based MT

Statistical MT

+ Consistent and predictable quality

- Unpredictable translation quality

+ Out-of-domain translation quality

- Poor out-of-domain quality

+ Knows grammatical rules

- Does not know grammar

+ High performance and robustness

High

CPU

and

disk

space

requirements
+ Consistency between versions

- Inconsistency between versions

- Lack of fluency

+ Good fluency

- Hard to handle exceptions to rules

+ Good for catching exceptions to rules

- High development and customization + Rapid and cost-effective development

costs

costs provided the required corpus

exists

Table 1. 1: Rule Based MT vs. Statistical MT

Hybrid MT
Hybrid machine translation (HMT) leverages the strengths of statistical and rulebased translation methodologies. Several MT organizations (such as Asia Online,
LinguaSys, Systran, and Polytechnic University of Valencia) claim a hybrid approach
that uses both rules and statistics.

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Contribution of ICT Development for Front-Office Operation of Hotel Industry

Language Translation Software
Language translation software is a computer program to translate input text from one
speaking language to another while maintaining the original document format using
the MT techniques mention above.
VoIP
VOIP is an acronym for Voice over Internet Protocol, or in more common terms
phone service over the Internet. If you have a reasonable quality Internet connection
you can get phone service delivered through your Internet connection instead of from
your local phone company (VoIP Innovations, 2013).
Voice over IP (VoIP) is a methodology and group of technologies for the delivery
of voice

communications and multimedia sessions

networks, such as the Internet (CISCO, 2012).

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over Internet

Protocol (IP)

Contribution of ICT Development for Front-Office Operation of Hotel Industry

2.3 Relevant Studies

World most widely use language translation softwares.

SYSTRAN
SYSTRAN is one of the leading suppliers of language translation software in the
current market. SYSTRAN is a leading machine translation solutions provider which
composes advanced language translation software that helps enterprises and
individuals to communicate more effectively in multiple languages (Systran, 2013).
SYSTRAN's software has been developed in such a way that it instantly translates
text from and into 52 languages for individuals to understand and publish any type of
information. Nowadays, SYSTRAN products are widely being used in worldwide
scale as the solutions increases business productivity in enterprise collaboration, ECommerce, customer support, knowledge management, search, and other
initiatives.
In 2009, SYSTRAN extended its position as the industry's leading innovator by
introducing the first hybrid machine translation engine. This breakthrough combines
the advantages of linguistic technology with statistical techniques so the software
automatically learns from existing and validated translations. SYSTRAN's hybrid
machine translation solution is easy and quick to customize. The self-learning
techniques allow users to train the software to any specific domain or business
objective to achieve cost-effective publishable quality translations. For more than 40
years, SYSTRAN products and solutions continue to be the choice of leading global
corporations (Symantec, Cisco, and EADS), Internet portals and public agencies like
the US Intelligence Community.
Following

Language

Translation

Software

SYSTRANS;

SYSTRAN 7 Home Translator

SYSTRAN 7 Office Translator

SYSTRAN 7 Business Translator

SYSTRAN 7 Premium Translator

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Packages

are

available

under

Contribution of ICT Development for Front-Office Operation of Hotel Industry

Google Translator
Google Translate is the most popular and free translation service that is currently
available at the market which provides instant translations between dozens of
different languages. Google Translate is a multilingual machine-translation service
provided by Google Inc. to translate written text from one language into another. It
allows translating words, sentences and web pages between any combinations of
the supported languages.
When it comes to Google translations, it looks for patterns in hundreds of millions of
documents to help decide on the best translation for the request. By detecting
patterns in documents that have already been translated by human translators,
Google Translate can make intelligent guesses as to what an appropriate translation
should be. The process of seeking patterns in large amounts of texts is known as
"statistical machine translation". Since these translations are generated by
machines, the translations are not hundred percent (100%) perfect.
Before October 2007, for languages except Arabic, Chinese and Russian, Google
use a SYSTRAN based translator which is used by other translation services such
as Babel Fish, AOL, and Yahoo. But now, Google Inc. has successfully switched to
its own in-house translation system of 71 languages. Other than the windows or
Linux based access, Google has provided compatibility with mobile operating
systems such as Android versions and IOS (I-phone) versions (Unknown, 2007).
Google Translate currently supports:
Afrikaans

Albanian

Arabic

Belarusian

Bosnian

Bulgarian

Catalan

Chinese

Croatian

Czech

Danish

Dutch

English

Esperanto

Estonian

Filipino

Finnish

French

Galician

German

Greek

Hebrew

Hindi

Hungarian

Icelandic

Indonesian

Irish

Italian

Japanese

Korean

Latvian

Lithuanian

Macedonian Malay

Maltese

Norwegian

Persian

Polish

Portuguese Romanian

Russian

Serbian

Slovak

Slovenian

Spanish

Swedish

Thai

Turkish

Ukrainian

Vietnamese Welsh

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Swahili

Yiddish

Contribution of ICT Development for Front-Office Operation of Hotel Industry

Current alpha languages are:
Armenian

Azerbaijani

Basque

Bengali

Cebuano

Georgian

Gujarati

Urdu

Hmong

Javanese

Kannada

Khmer

Lao

Latin

Marathi

Tamil

Telugu

Haitian Creole

Babylon 9 / 2013
Babylon is considered to be a market leader in translation software and online
translation assistance for over 10 years. Their most popular product is known to be
Babylon 9 which offers all the bells and whistles from previous software versions
plus a few new tricks to create translation software filled with advanced features and
specifications. In compared its translation accuracy and availability in more than two
dozen languages, this considered as the best translation software. Babylon 9 is the
Gold Award winner of 2013 for their program integration, text-to-speech feature,
instant webpage translations and its ability to support a large variety of formats and
files. When it comes to the program compatibility, the software is compatible with
Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7.
Main Features of the Babylon 9 Application

Simple One-Click Translation in any Application

Available in over 75 Languages

Spelling and Proofreading

Over 2,000 Dictionary Titles

Wikipedia @ a click in over 25 languages

Integrates seamlessly into Microsoft Office Spellers

Web Page and Document translation

World time zones, currencies and units conversion

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Contribution of ICT Development for Front-Office Operation of Hotel Industry

Power Translator Premium
Power Translator is our most economical desktop software line. It meets the needs
of individuals to communicate with family and friends. This software is great for
students. Translate letters, emails, chats, and blogs, Translate from any program
effortlessly and Accurate, fast, flexible
New Features and Improvements

Greater speed and accuracy: Improvements have been made to all translation
engine dictionaries and grammars resulting in better translations than ever
before.

Speech-to-text: Integration of Microsofts speech recognition for English,

German, French, Spanish, Japanese, and Chinese when running under Vista
or Windows 7. English, Chinese, and Japanese speech recognition is
supported under XP. Translate your speech. Control translation applications
with your voice.

Text-to-Speech: for Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese,

Korean, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.

Hover Translation: Point the cursor at a word and a translation of the

sentence or word immediately appears near the text.

Translate Selection: Select any text and its translation appears next to it.

Text Capture: Import text to Logo-Trans (translates text that you type, paste,
or drop) from any program. No need to cut and paste: just click or draw a
rectangle around the text you want to import.

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Contribution of ICT Development for Front-Office Operation of Hotel Industry

PROMT Professional 9.5
PROMT Professional 9.5 is a text translation solution for small and medium
business. PROMT can quickly obtain high-quality translations of documents, Web
sites, or emails. With this program you don't need to waste your time searching for a
proper word in dictionaries, it is possible to load the text entirely and to get smooth
translation and also full information for separate words and phrases. The program
also works without Internet access.
Key benefits

Support of the most common office applications and file formats

The translation of PDF files in a user-friendly mode

The maximum possibilities for translation quality management

Creation and use of Translation Memory bases

Batch file translation

A program for comfortable work

PROMT Professional 9.0 translates between the following languages: English Russian and Russian English; English - German and German- English; EnglishSpanish and Spanish-English; English-Portuguese and Portuguese-English; EnglishFrench and French-English; English-Italian and Italian-English.
Following are some successful attempt of VoIP technology as a solution to language
barriers in the world.

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Contribution of ICT Development for Front-Office Operation of Hotel Industry

TransVox
The only credible approach has been to use an army of expensive translators
capable of bridging the language and culture gap. To this end Prognosis UK Ltd,
have developed their TransVox application to encourage communication and for
people to converse with people from all over the world without language being a
barrier.
TransVox will now allow for multilingual two way speech to speech translation in a
variety of languages, English, Chinese, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese,
Russian and more. TransVox, powered by advanced speech technology and
translation from Google, will allow you to converse with people who speak different
languages without you needing to have any knowledge of that language. Their
professional services create domain specific lexicons for government agencies and
institutions that can dramatically increase the quality of translations. Just imagine
being somewhere and you see a nice guy/girl but dont have the language skills to
communicate, what a great ice breaker to use a tool like TransVox to say something
to them and get that conversation started.
Skype ULRTMT
Skype recently introduced the Universal Language Real-Time Message Translator
(ULRTMT), which lets users translate their chats to and from one of 13 languages,
including: English, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, German, French, and
Arabic. They also offer a live translation service for conference calls of up to 5
participants (Veres, 2006). At $2.99 a minute, it's probably cheaper than hiring a
private translator, but expensive enough that your average individual or small
business user won't want to use it for anything but the shortest calls.
Another promising development comes courtesy of Sharp and IBM, in the form of a
handheld English-Japanese translator. It's similar in size and shape to the average
PDA and due out by the end of the year. Although there's something to be said for
doing one thing only, but doing it well, it would be nice if this device had the ability to
translate languages beyond Japanese and English (Veres, 2006).

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Contribution of ICT Development for Front-Office Operation of Hotel Industry

Analysis on tourist arrivals to Sri Lanka and there speaking languages
Top ten tourist generation countries
Country

Speaking Languages

India
UK
Germany
France
Maldives
Australia
Canada
USA
Russia

Hindi, Tamil, English

English
German, Polish
French
Devehi
English
English and French
English
Russian

Table 1. 2: Language of Speaking Top ten tourist arrivals to Sri Lanka (SLTDA, 2011)

Emerging countries
Country

Speaking Languages

China
Arabian

Mandarin, Chinese
Arabic

Table 1. 3: Language of Speaking Emerging Tourist generating countries

Top ten languages use in world according to Nationalencyklopedin (2007)

Language

Native speakers
(in millions)

% of world
population

Mandarin
Spanish

935
387

14.1%
5.85%

English

365

5.52%

Hindi
Arabic

295
280

4.46%
4.23%

Portuguese

204

3.08%

Bengali

202

3.05%

Russian

160

2.42%

Japanese
Punjabi
German

127
96
92

1.92%
1.44%
1.39%

Table 1. 4: World mostly using languages

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Mainly spoken in
China, Taiwan, Singapore
Hispanic America, Spain, United States,
Equatorial Guinea
Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, New
Zealand, United Kingdom, United States,
South Africa, Singapore, Philippines
India, Fiji, Nepal
North Africa, Western Asia (Middle East),
East Africa
Angola, Brazil, Mozambique, Portugal, So
Tom and Prncipe
Bangladesh, West Bengal (India), Tripura
(India), Assam (India)
Russia, former Republics of the Soviet
Union, Mongolia, Israel
Japan
Punjab region (India, Pakistan)
Austria,
Belgium
(Eupen-Malmedy),
Germany,
Luxembourg,
Liechtenstein,
Switzerland, South Tirol (in Italy)

Contribution of ICT Development for Front-Office Operation of Hotel Industry

Chapter 3 - Methodology

Due to the time constrains, the data about hospitality industry and front office related
issues regarding to the above mention problem qualitative data were collected using
the unstructured interviews conducted with front office managers of three star and
below level resorts, senior receptionists currently working in star class hotels and five
foreign guests who are currently staying in hotels in Sri Lanka.
Interview questions for the hotel employees

What are nationalities of guest coming to your hotel?

What are the languages your hotel staff is capable of handling?

When a guest with less fluency in English how you face the problem of
communicating with him/her?

How do you deal with a guest who is not speaking English at all?

How the guest feel when you do not understand what he/she says to you in
their language?

How do you deal with different langue speaking guests when there are no tour
guides to assist?

Do you know about any ICT solutions that can be used to address these
communication problems?

Have you use any ICT solution to address this communicating problem?

What is your suggestions a new ICT solution to help you in communicating

with others?

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Contribution of ICT Development for Front-Office Operation of Hotel Industry

Interview questions for the guests

What will be your preferred language to communicate with others?

Are you fluent in English?

What are the type of telecommunication devise are you use when you are
travelling? ( Are you using mobile phone, smart phone or tab)

What are the ways you express someone, when he/she does not
understanding the language you speaking?

Are you using IT solutions in above problem?

What is your overall impression of communicating support provide you at

hotel reception?

What do you think about a personal assistance language translation support

provided by the hotel?

Observation is carried out during the peak hours at the reception desk of above
mentions hotels. Also observations are used to get the details about performance of
the computer hardware they are using at front office and as well as the performance
of ICT infrastructure they have in hotel.
The secondary data were collected using the available past researches,
documentations and vendor information available on the World Wide Web.

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Contribution of ICT Development for Front-Office Operation of Hotel Industry

Chapter 4 - Research Findings

According to the literature review carried out in the area of natural language
translation and its practice in the field of Tourism and Hospitality industry, its seems
to be the ICT solutions which are capable of handling the language barriers at hotel
receptions are not acquire in the present scenario. According to the research
findings following are the available ICT solutions that can be straightforwardly use to
address the above problem;
1. Free Online Language Translation Solutions
2. Language Translations Softwares
3. Language Translation services through VoIP

As per the interviews had with the front office staff of hotels in Sri Lanka, following
points were highlighted;
1. The lack of knowledge in front office executives in ICT.
2. Technological infrastructure is available but solutions are not identified.
3. Misuse of technology by lower level staff ( example receptionist) cause to

restrict technological facilities

4. Lack of IT training provided by the hotel.

According to the observation had in hotels, modern foreign guests are using their
electronic devices like mini-laptops, I-pads and I-phones to address this problem. But
they have problem with getting internet facility for their devices, because they use
free online softwares. According to the interviews had with Tourist and Hotel Staff,
they will be delightful to have some ICT solutions to help them when they get
problems with communicating with other language speaking people.

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Contribution of ICT Development for Front-Office Operation of Hotel Industry

Chapter 5 - Conclusion & Recommendations

According to the considerations of facts that identified in the research its shows that
there is need for such a system in hotels, which will help small and medium scale
hotels to cater for more foreign guest from different nationalities and by occupying
less number of front office staff.
As per the research findings the suggestion is to use free online translation
softwares that can be run on the available computer hardware and softwares at
hotels. Because 80% of hotels front office have suitable hardware and internet
connection. Therefore there is no initial installation cost and no licensing cost. Those
free online solutions are easy to learn and available to use at any given time.
As further developments in future, this problem can be solved by providing VoIP
solution. This will be really successful work, because human translation will be use
and translation service will be provided as online service. This will be new innovation
services that can be developed as a new business opportunity in Sri Lanka.
There will be two final recommendations to address the above mention problem;
1. Use of free online language translation software or purchased
language translation software.
2. Language Translation as VoIP Service Solution
This will be a software service, where you have hired actual humans to
translate your words to another language. This will be online language
translation service provided by original humans using the VoIP
technology. For example, When you ever want to translate your
English to Russian , you only have generate a call from your smart
phone that service provider then that service provider will translate your
words to Russian, when the guest reply back to it, that service provider
again translate that Russian words to English as you can hear.

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Contribution of ICT Development for Front-Office Operation of Hotel Industry

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