Sean Seah, Senior Vice President of Strategy, Technology and Innovation at Langham Hospitality Group, has spent his career learning to fall in love with the solution, not the problem. Reflecting on the process of designing a frictionless check-in experience for implementation across Langham’s (rapidly expanding) portfolio of more than 30 hotels across four continents, Seah explains: “You can’t go around with a solution like artificial intelligence (AI) just looking for things to plug it into.”
AI is absolutely the solution to some problems. And, in other circumstances it’s absolutely not. “If I’m trying to refine the check-in experience, sure, I could try to use AI or augmented reality, or some other technology, but if it makes more sense to reorganise the lobby space with better sight lines and smoother foot traffic, why would I get hung up on implementing some shiny new tool?” Seah argues. “I don’t back a technology, I back a problem, because solving problems solves business issues. You have to fall in love with the problem and then pick the right solution, not the other way around.”
This propensity to place the end results before whichever solution happens to be in vogue doesn’t make him a luddite or technologically conservative; Seah has spent almost thirty years at the forefront of the digital transformation process in an array of industries. Over the course of his career, he explains, he’s learned to be discerning, and to suit the solution to the problem. I sat down with him to find out more about picking the right technology to solve business problems, how he tests, develops, and scales his solutions, and how he’s helping drive the next era of growth and transformation for Langham Hospitality Group.
Start small, scale fast, and don’t forget the people
Picking the right technology for the moment and the problem at hand is a skill Seah has refined over the course of his career. “When you’re deciding whether to pick a technology, you have to test and learn,” he says. “You’ve got to pilot something small – ideate it, then you can incubate it. And if it works you figure out how to industrialise it.” Now, back at Langham again after more than a decade, Seah is applying this approach to support the organisation’s goal. Not only to expand its footprint in multiple markets, but to do so while leading in innovation.
However, he adds that one of the most important lessons he learned early on in his career was that digital transformation is much more reliant on people than the technology. “When you start out, you think it’s all about technology. You think it’s about new business models. But it’s really about people,” he says. “It’s about how they view change and how that change impacts them.”
Seah reflects that, 15 years ago when he first started at Langham, less than 5% of all travel booking was done online. Back then, 95% of sales went through travel agents and other offline avenues involving sales in the much more traditional sense. “I’ve come back 15 years later and it’s flipped,” he says. “Now, it’s 80-to-90% digital.” Furthermore, Seah stresses the importance of bringing people along for the digital transformation journey. “That’s been the hardest thing, changing people’s mindset, followed by getting them to accept the subsequent changes to the way they do their jobs.”
A mandate to innovate
Bob van den Oord took over as Langham Hospitality Group CEO in 2023, quickly calling on his old colleague to “help him shake things up” at the group. “I jumped at the chance,” recalls Seah. “Bob is a very collaborative boss, and he gives me the space I need to get things done.” When Seah rejoined Langham, van den Oord gave him a simple two-part mandate. “He told me to come up with disruptive ideas. And he said he wanted me to build the most innovative company in the world.”
So, no pressure then. Seah is measuring the success of his innovations, not just against other hotel chains. But against “the world’s most innovative companies, period. That means, Apple, Tesla, Nike. Why not?” Seah points out that all the world’s most innovative companies are in the business of using technology to curate and create experiences. “Experience is what the hotel business is all about,” he says. “An experienced design that touches all five senses: touch, taste, smell, hear, and feel. Everyone wants to be the best, especially in luxury hotels. You want to create this magical experience, and technology enables a great deal of that experience delivery.”
