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The event management software will see an increase to USD 12.51 billion by 2023. It is because big data analytics has gradually become the most important phenomenon in the 21st century. What's more, event planning software will also be used to differentiate the types of events by building a customer data. Another point of this article is the increase will be located in Asia- Pacific area, such as China, India and Indonesia.

This article discusses a study performed at various diving locations in the Philippines to determine whether or not measures taken by Green Fin diving guides were effective in reducing contact with coral reef systems. The study also recorded the average number of contacts with the reef during a dive, as well as the equipment or body part which came into contact with the reef most often, and which actions resulted in the most damage. The study finds that adherence to Green Fin standards or other policies may significantly impact diver behaviors and reduce the level of contact with sensitive coral reefs during SCUBA dives.

Great article looking at the trends in events, many of which I have witnessed this past year. What I would like for the class to read is the description of awareness based events. As my husband's an associate dean of a hospitality school, he worked with his event and conference manager and his dietetic program chair to create an interactive health fair looking at diabetes education and attracted 300 participants. I observed the power of community based programming in the event space and how this type of programming may be the future.

Alice, a relatively new start-up which sells operations software to hotels, had a significant investment from Expedia in the previous round of funding. Alice has become a software that provides "the first unified platform for a hotel to run its entire back end operations, such as housekeeping and customer service communication". The system allows guests to send a text message with a request for more pillows or towels, for example, which will be directed to the proper the hotel employee department. Customers can track their requests and both the front and back of house staff can receive communications from guest requests. This IT platform has seen 5 times the amount of requests being generated. Also, the platform has partnered with double the number of hotels and they project more than two million requests will be communicated through this software in a year. Expedia is the largest shareholder in Alice currently. Alice suggests that this is because Expedia could be more interested in "more back-end software services for the hotels that use it to market and distribute their inventory globally." Expedia currently markets tools such as revenue management under the name Expedia Powered Technology to hoteliers. Expedia also offers meetings and events booking tools for hotels. Priceline, which is a competitor to Expedia, also has invested in tools and services that include revenue management software for their hotel partners. Trivago is also offering these services. Alice believes that the size of the market will allow for many other companies to work in this space, and is even open to partnering with other firms to expand. Alice also plans to expand their own business and add personnel with the new funds.

Cvent and Destination Marketing Association have joined as alliance partners. This was announced in January 2013. According to DMAI, Cvent will provide meeting professionals with more educational opportunities and promote the use of destination marketing organizations. The purpose of promoting DMOs is to show they can be the a point of contact. DMAI supports this because they are looking to support the meeting community and advocate why DMOs are a valuable source for meeting professionals to go to directly. With this alliance, CVENT has integrated information from the empowerMINT website by DMI into its own Destination Guide. DMAI foresees this will help meeting professionals quicken searches during the RFP process. Added to the Cvent website is a new feature to the RFP process which allows planners to add DMOs and CVBs on every RFP they send. After reading the article I found this to be an interesting alliance because I think both organizations will be able to help each other make meeting professional's lives easier. Cvent is a popular program in the events industry since it allows you to fill out one RFP and send it to multiple companies over the internet. DMOs are important part of the industry, which can help a planner plan an event in an unknown destination or provide contact information for additional venues or products. Integrating information will allow meeting professionals to save time but still be able to focus on the event. An important area I believe it promotes is the use of DMOs, which makes it more convenient for people to find DMOs in specific regions. DMOs have a great impact on the event because they know the region, especially if a meeting planner is not from the area. Ultimately this alliance will help further the important value DMOs bring to the meeting community.

SalesPro is not a new system to the hotel industry. Directors of Sales and Sales and Catering Managers would be lost without a system to keep track of their meetings and conferences, as well as to collect payments and maintain guest listings and price brackets and rate plans for those groups. Food and Beverage directors find it helpful as well, as each group maintains their own banquet event order and the food and beverages are charged accordingly. What is new, however, is that hotel SystemsPro is enhancing its hotel SalesPro to include mobile options, where hotel sales teams and managers can obtain remote access to the system for real time information about the property. This is a handy tool, as sales representatives are frequently traveling and seeking new clients by completing sales calls externally. Should a client be interested in the pricing or availability during a sales visit, the sales manager can then immediately seek the information and provide it to the client. Efficiency and convenience are key factors for consumers when choosing a space, whether it is for their meeting, function, guest room needs, or anything else for that matter. Being able to immediately provide the answers to the questions that a client may have will gain the advantage, and potentially persuade the client to book the space or facilities on the spot, as opposed to having to contact them at a later time with the information, as by then, the client may have already made a decision to go with someone else. SalesPro is already a top choice for hotel businesses, as it boasts a high performance, and boasts to help boost sales and reduce operating costs. It also claims to offer property solutions that include reporting capabilities, allowing enhancement of a quality guest experience. This new development is simply an additional benefit to the system, and is offered to SalesPro users at no additional cost, making it that much more of an asset to the sales team.

I found this article very interesting. It deals with the development of a new website that incorporates all facets of event planning into one central hub. The website was coined "honey book" a conjunction between honeymoon and booking. It's creator Naama Alom, got the idea when she, herself, was planning her own wedding. She realized that there was not one place where she could store all of her event, vendor, and decor information. "Honey book" is also a medium to share your event highlights with family and friends. Naama decided that Facebook was not sufficient enough and when investors expressed interest, Naama and her husband packed up and moved from Israel to the United States. The US housed the billion-dollar target market that "honey book" was developed for.

this article talks about the merger between Sabre and Passkey in creating a new system for improved group reservations. this new technology benefits directly meeting planners and hotels by creating an automated system that communicate reservations directly to the property management system. some of the benefits include real-time reports and tracking, ability to maximize attendance and therefore revenue, greater efficiency, and direct communication.

According to the article Event Management Software 2020 Trends, from a general perspective, the remarkable growth can be linked to the rise of technology-based goods and services across all markets. That said, the Mordor Intelligence study provides some more nuanced insights into why event management software growth has become one of the biggest event trends for 2020. Among these is the usefulness of mobile applications in the event setting. Mobile apps allow for event planners, speakers and attendees to stay up to date on everything in real time.

The article is talking about the yield management system for hotel. It first introduced the importance of the yield management in hotel, and by using the proper yield management hotels can maximize their profit. Then the article showed us how a yield management works for a hotel and the regular pattern of the peak days in a week. The author wrote all of these just want to show us what the YM system can do better for the hotel, but I will take it to reconsideration. This system must be based on the data source to do the yield management, however, besides the price, the outside events or economic changes will have a very strong influence on the hotel occupancy. So this system is helpful for the hotels, but the hoteliers should not rely on it.

Yield management is the way of influencing consumer and getting more profit by manipulating the prices according to what season, month or weekday. The price of the room and the value of night is zero if this date passes. The owner must be very careful when changes the prices when its time to populate empty rooms, rates cannot be dropped dramatically. Customer can learn it and will always book at the very last day when the prices are the lowest but if your hotel focus on business travel weekdays make more revenue, if its more a leisure travel hotel holidays and weekends should bring more profit. The prices can be higher in peak season and holidays. The software for yield management might be afforded in order to get best results in price management, bookkeeping, human resources, customer service and what not. If you don't have enough resources you should subscribe this software and not risk with creating your own software for same purposes.

This article references the specifics of the M3 platform, which is a more efficient accounting software for hoteliers. After several test runs, M3 has proven to help several properties streamline their accounting process, track data in real time and cut costs where possible.

M3 is a useful hotel accounting software that can be used on mobile devices, according to the illustrations. As mentioned in this article, accounting software can do things that generic providers can't, like delivering actionable business intelligence. For M3, it also gains the property managers more benchmarking insight and turned a management company's IT department into a profit center that offers service. Furthermore, by replacing the IT department with two employees and a cloud-based accounting system, it saved a large sum for a management company.

About a decade ago, the hotel industry was concentrating much of its effort on luring people who are now mostly in their 50s and 60s. The changes involved higher-quality beds, brighter lighting and bigger work spaces. And those travelers were loyal to brands that offered reliable, comfortable services. Many of these Generation Y travelers in the 20's and 30's are engaged in planning major events such as scheduling nightly social events, like happy hours and free wine tastings. Event management and planning is critical to every hospitality organization especially to our millennial travelers and business travelers.

The University of Minnesota offers a graduate-level class called "Event Management in Sport" in which the 30 students create and implement a volunteer management plan for the sporting event the Final Four where an estimated 1,000+ volunteers participate.

Physical and cyber security must coexist at mass participation events as threats can be in both forms. Organizers must create strategies to identify, manage, and mitigate these threats that can devastate events. This can be done with a multi-disciplinary security team and clear visibility to build intelligence. Information sharing and private sector engagement are also important tools within this process.

This article talks about how there is a serious concern in the hotel industry when it comes to credit card and identity theft. They talk about how all the major brands in the hotel industry were all victims of highly publicized, major breaches in the last year alone. Also, including airline and banks, hotels maintain a wealthy amount of database of personal and financial data. For example, with new technology systems being created, POS systems are a weak security point for many networks because they are constantly in use and are not always updated or even protected from vulnerabilities. The article talks about personal details for hotel guests are frequently stored in a variety of locations including restaurants, facilities, and government buildings, so hackers have a greater possibility to access your personal information. The bigger hotels are in more danger because of the volume of guests that come in and out of the location. Smaller hotels should be concerned not just about their security but also by ransomware, an increasingly favorable tactic to extort hoteliers by hackers who encrypt the hotels data making it inaccessible until ransom is paid for. I believe hotels need a toolbelt of various securtiy technologies that can be used to prevent future malicious attacks. I think by managing and implementing a firewall is essential which helps get rid of dangerous traffic from coming onto the network and preventing sensitive data from being hacked.

MOD 10: This article discusses the main tactics of cyber hackers that target hotels. Point of sale (POS) systems are easy targets for hackers due to their constant use during operation hours and because of that their security measures aren't always up to date. Hotels have large data banks since they're storing consumer profile information such as home addresses, phone numbers and credit card numbers. There's a large risk when it comes to security breaches within franchises because they have access to their parent company's regional, national and global systems. If their systems are hacked and breached, then that puts the whole system of the brand at risk. Security breaches within a system can also damage a brands reputation with the public. According to the article, "Recent major breaches at Fortune 500 companies and household names across the retail, restaurant and hotel sectors demonstrate that anti-virus, anti-malware and firewalls alone are not enough to secure businesses from the ever-evolving threat landscape." Smaller properties are even at a greater risk because not only do they have to monitor their compliance with PCI but also monitoring their security systems for their database and PMS system. Some of the recommended software's that should be used by hotels looking to be proactive with their company's cyber security is File Integrity Monitoring(FIM), Unified Threat Management(UTM), and Security Information and Event Management(SIEM).

This article explores the different tactics hotels should use after a cyber attack. The article mentions several different type of attacks such as Phishing when hackers trick customers into giving up their login credentials. Ransomware, when hackers encrypt data making it unusable and inaccessible for the hotel. Not one solution but rather companies should be equipped with a series of technologies from firewalls to file monitoring programs. Some of these technologies, like SIEM requires an intelligent IT team to have the capabilities of analyzing and monitoring the reports produced. This may be more difficult for smaller businesses to implement and maintain.

Hotels POS systems are at risk for customers. Hackers are using tactics like Phishing and ransomware. Hotels must take action and arm themselves with a "toolbelt" of security options to combat the hackers.

This article explores the issues with cyber security in the hotel industry. it is to be taken seriously because customer information is on the line and so is the company's reputation and revenue. Hotels must look into their POS systems because, according to the article, is a weak security point. However, it holds much of the consumer's information like credit card numbers, expiration dates, and etc. The POS system is vulnerable so the secuiry put in place to protect it must be updated. Personal details for hotel guests are stored in many different places in a hotel's many systems. This includes the restaurant, gift shops, billing, facilities, and etc. According to the article, hotels needs a "toolbelt" of various security technologies to prevent malicious attacks. The three mentioned in the article are File Integrity Monitoring, Unified Threat Management, and Security Information and Event Management. Please look into the article to read what each of these systems can do in regards to cyber secuity for the hospitality industry. A good way to implement these tools is to look into outsourcing a managing security firm that specializes in cyber security. This can help minimize and even diminish things that can cause breaches in systems. In my opinion, this article gives solutions to hotels in regards to cyber security. Sometimes installing a firewall or antivirus is simply not enough. A security firm that specializes in this area can be considered. It may be expensive depending on the business to do that, however, it will be even more expensive to have a tarnished reputation for not securing customer information and to deal with lawusuits.

StarwoodMeetings.com is a new simple website that can provide all the useful information about the meeting planning in Starwood hotels. This website can give the planners full property details such as the hotel feature, integrated maps, photos and floor plans, on-site meeting service, and meeting management tools for event planners to plan their events easier. A compare view tool which provided by this website can helps planners to compare hotels and their special offers. This new site also includes information on signature services like Starwood Preferred Planner and On-site Specialty Event. The Starwood hotel listens to customers' feedback and tries to provide all the useful information which needed by the event planners throughout the planning cycle. What's more, planners can get special offer which available at more than 350 Starwood properties in North and South America when they book event through this website. In order to encourage planner to book meeting on this new web, hotel provide bonus for those planners. Those bonuses include a welcome reception, percent off master-billed rooms, or complimentary room upgrades.

This is a great tool for event planners and a very smart move on Starwood's part. By giving the event planners access to this software they avoid unnecessary phone calls asking basic questions and save valuable time that could be used for something else. If it enhances Starwood's productivity and does not frustrate the event planners (user friendly/ user acceptance) it should become more prevalent in other hotels as well.