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The solutions associated with the challenges of enhancing the guest experience and presenting a business case to senior management will be discussed by hospitality experts including Daniel Hajjar and Radi Karnib at the 3rd Annual Hotel Technology Middle East exhibition and conference in September. Current exhibitors include: Sony, Jumbo, Mitel, VingCard and Aegis Tech.

fifty-six percent of hospitality organisations planned to raise mobile investments to better equip their workforces, improve operational efficiencies and ultimately enhance the customer experience.

Chain hotels 77% more likely to increase technology investments, while independent counterparts prioritize room renovation

Reliance on technology is becoming increasingly important in the lodging industry as hotels begin to recognize how they can gain key competitive advantage with strategic technology investments.

cost continues to be the key barrier with technology adoption for many hoteliers

Business analytics not only tops the list of IT investments, but it also ranks first on the list of departments that executives think deserve even more investment.

As companies transition to cloud-based technologies, they spend heavily on custom configurations and ensuring applications work in conjunction with each other.

“There’s huge competition out there in the cloud market, and so that competition is very likely to drive down the cost of those cloud-based services,”

The updates to the Station Casinos network have helped the company connect 15,000 different devices, including some of the 23,000 newer slot machines installed at its various casinos. All the networked slot machines and gaming area monitors, including surveillance cameras, operate in real time and connect to a real-time data warehouse -- still a rare practice in the gaming industry, Baltz said. The UCS and related technologies that Station Casinos has installed have made the network more adaptable and resilient, according to Baltz. "About 80% of our revenue comes from slot machines -- that's why our network is so important. Downtime is not an option," he said.

"There's absolutely savings on our costs with these technologies," said Van Baltz, a vice president and chief technology officer at Station Casinos, in an interview. Baltz wouldn't quantify the savings that the new systems have delivered, but at one point during the interview he said the return on investment has been "wildly" better than expected.

The investment is designed to strengthen Choice’s technology platform, automate back and front office processes at franchised hotel properties and drive increased central reservation system (CRS) delivery to Choice-branded hotels which will position the brands for future growth.

The multi-million dollar IT investment will include the international roll-out of choiceADVANTAGE, the company’s web-based Property Management System (PMS) which automates front and back office hotel processes such as check-in, invoicing and inventory management, starting with testing in the UK market later this year.

A recent study of 2,000 people conducted by Guestline, looked how people book their hotels and the factors involved in room cancellations. It was found that over a quarter of people take into high consideration the quality and detail of a hotel's website (such as photographs and information) before making a direct booking online1.

Investing money into your websites simplicity in all stages of the guest journey will help acquire traffic, increase conversion rates and drive more people to book direct. The simplicity of website use (including less re-directs) will result trustworthiness of the potential customer. Hotel management may also find reporting efficient with less redirect windows to consider.

An investment in secure payment gateways protects the data of hotel guests, and the hotels credibility. For example, if a guest was to see the wrong value on an invoice, they may become wary of how secure that hotel's payment system is and look elsewhere. A secure payment gateway also checks in advance whether the credit card exists and is covered which could reduce chargebacks. This way, the hotelier can make sure that the booking via the credit card is genuine and at the same time protect the guest's data.

The Keys to Marriott's Success Long before the economy went south, Marriott had a reputation for finding creative ways to wrest the most value from every IT dollar.

The devil is in the details—success is in the system.-The Spirit to Serve Metrics drive Marriott. Talk to an IT associate on any given day, and he can tell you exactly how much business the company processed via its systems that week per second ($3,568 when this reporter visited).When implementing the PeopleSoft enterprise service automation module for project tracking and time reporting within IT, for example, programmers developed a tool so that project and productivity metrics are automatically computed after time is entered. Another rule for metrics is to make sure that the right people get the right data in a form that’s meaningful to them. "You need to measure a lot of things, but the trick is to publish the right information to the relevant audience," says Melnick. "Having Marriott.com up and running is not as important as the dollars running through it," explains Keppler. Melnick adds, "For each system we try to focus on the core metrics. And that changes. What might have been important the day you go live becomes a nonevent a few weeks in." For example, five years ago the critical metric for Marriott.com was uptime. Today, it’s how much business the website books. Last year, metrics fueled the IT department’s decision to invest in an upgrade to the site that would make it easier to reserve rooms. Today, more than 75 percent of rooms booked online come through Marriott.com, saving the company $12 million annually.Keeping its eye on the numbers lets Marriott revisit business cases for IT projects each quarter. "The project itself may not change that much, but something external may happen—something like SARS, something from the competition," Melnick explains. "Just because you start a project and it’s on track doesn’t mean you want to keep the same pace. There may be something that comes up that’s even better." Success is never final.-The Spirit to Serve Though the IT department’s resourcefulness is helping keep Marriott afloat during hard times, Wilson and his peers aren’t taking anything for granted. They say they can’t let their culture of resourcefulness wither away when the economy turns around. They’re reminded of how easy it could be to let their guard down each time they flip through Mr. Marriott’s book in which he quotes Somerset Maugham: "The unfortunate thing about this world is that good habits are so much easier to give up than bad ones."But Wilson believes the principles and procedures put in place for prudent and resourceful IT decision making should keep the company on the straight and narrow and ahead of the competition."I have a firm belief that the only real sustainable competitive advantage we can get with IT is making sure our people understand conceptually what IT can and can’t do and apply it better than competitors," Wilson says. "Anything we do in IT, a competitor can install. What they can’t capture that quickly is having a team of people throughout the company that really gets this and follows it all the way through. That’s sustainable."Marriott has valued resourcefulness—on paper if not always in practice—for decades. But resourcefulness is not an end in itself. It’s a tool one uses in the ongoing construction of value, a project that’s never finished. Or, as Mr. Marriott says succinctly in his book, "Success is never final."

The face of travel and tourism sectors across the globe has felt the revolutionising forces of technology, but what is the biggest challenge associated with this giant shift?

the biggest challenge that comes with technological advancement is the probability of replacing existing staff with a technological device, since the device can do the same job just as well.

“The advancement of technology in the industry comes with many advantages: a travel agent in the 90s compared to a travel agent now is as different as night and day. But we can’t afford for this change to be the cause of a loss of jobs merely because a machine can do the work. We need to continue to innovate the way we deliver a service to customers, incorporating both the benefits of technology and human touch,” he says.

Some believe the vendor RFP process allows a hotel company to pick the most qualified service/product provider through an unbiased decision process. Perhaps this is the case for commoditized supplies or services (housekeeping supplies, linens, laundry, etc.) where the RFP process allows for comparing the proverbial "apples to apples."

At a typical hotel, who is equipped with the latest best practices in digital technology and marketing to sufficiently and adequately prepare a vendor RFP? Very few hotel companies have the bandwidth and depth of knowledge to adequately identify the digital needs of the property. Nor can they convey the property's needs and wants in the digital space and where it needs to be in 6, 12, 24 and 36 months from now. Lastly, who at the property can afford to devote considerable time to research and prepare a vendor RFP that asks the right questions, conveys the right objectives and provides a solid framework for evaluating and comparing one digital technology and marketing firm to the next?

On the hotel side, the typical vendor RFP process easily takes 50+ hours from beginning to end. On the digital technology and marketing vendor side, time to review, respond, and present takes upwards of 25-40 hours. Typically, three vendors compete and with all parties combined the entire RFP process will cost upwards of $15,000-$20,000. Beyond the cost, this process consumes the time and energy of multiple people and departments on an average of every two years for the hotel company.

Maintenance is a combination of actions carried out to retain an item/machine/equipment/system/plant in order to restore it to an acceptable working condition. The purpose of maintenance is to increase the system availability.

A. BUILDING & SYSTEM’S OPERATION • Continuous attention is required for operating the buildings effectively.

B. BUILDING MAINTANCE • A large number of basic activities need to be undertaken if the building is to preserve its initial appearance & function.

Businesses that invest in delivering on consumer expectations typically see an increase in brand loyalty, which leads to an increase in revenue.

Technology has become a key component in giving one hotel an edge over another, especially with the increasing popularity of a digital-first approach among travelers. By implementing the right tech, hotels can impress guests, streamline operations, and generate more revenue. It’s critical for hoteliers to stay current with technological advancements, so they can keep pace with expectations.

Mobile devices are the easiest and best way to reach guests- the average hotel guest checks in with at least three mobile devices.

With word processing tools and specialized accounting software, it is fair to say that technologies have dramatically improved accuracy in the field and reduced the margin of error.

statistical analysis and forecast modeling much more efficiently without spending years completing core training.

Accountants Need IT Skills in Addition to Other Business Skills