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In an age where travelers of all ages turn to the Internet to book flight and hotel reservations, modern travel agents are offering expert advice on cruises and tour packages to far-flung locales, advice on the best a particular city has to offer, exclusive perks, hidden discount prices and the security of an adviser in case of inconvenience or disaster.

Successful agents know that their customers have access to lots of travel information -- often too much -- and want time-saving guidance, exclusivity and security in a complicated world.

It's true that there are fewer U.S. travel agents today: 105,910 in 2010 versus 111,000 in 2006, according to the American Society of Travel Agents. And there are fewer agencies: 14,800 agencies in 2010, compared with 18,850 in 2006, according to ASTA.

In the future, eco-travelers may have a green cruise option in the Solar Floating Resort (SFR) concept. Powered entirely by solar photovoltaic panels that cover it like a skin, this sleek boat/resort/luxury submarine is just the sort of place Italian industrial designer Michele Puzzolante imagines. "Solar energy technologies such as photovoltaic panels could provide a third of the world's energy by 2060 if politicians commit to limiting global warming," says Puzzolante on her Solar Floating Resort website. Puzzolante's SFR relies entirely on non-polluting solar power and uses modular manufacturing techniques currently being used in the naval and automobile industries, kind of like LEGO pieces.

Such innovations are aimed at a food-truck sector largely populated by small entrepreneurs with good reasons to embrace technology but little means to afford it.

To make mobile management technology more accessible to truck operators, Mobi Munch recently incorporated the centrally hosted Micros Simphony point-of-sale system into its food-truck technology suite.

The system provides detailed reporting and business intelligence to operators and enables online credit authorization via the 4G/3G network. Because it is centrally hosted, stored data is never at risk even in the event of hardware failure on the truck. 29

Your Disney World vacation booking starts at CRO and is in the CRO system or comes in as a Disney Vacation Package. The key point is that the actual Disney World Resort, like the Grand Floridian, has no record of your reservation until it is transferred to the Disney resort itself. That happens either 3 or 4 days out. Sorry I forget the exact number of days out the specific Disney Resort gets the reservation in their hotel Lilo Reservation System.

Other Disney resorts have thousands of rooms with turns that can be very little or 50% of the hotel could turn over in just one day.

While it is still certainly possible to potentially clone a MagicBand (and thereby gain access to protected resources by impersonating the original band holder), the fact that the band operates on the 2.4 GHZ frequency inherently presents some challenges to any would-be malicious users. Admission to the parks is fairly expensive (Fig. 5) and the cost of the hardware required to conduct such a cloning attack far exceeds the cost of a legitimate day pass. For the attack to even be considered economical, the malicious user must clone many passes over time.

Part of the MagicBand system allows guests to make purchases with the band at specific registers provided they have tied a credit/debit card to their account via an external process. This can be seen as a very big convenience to guests who do not wish to continually use their cards to make purchases while in the parks, or for those who find themselves wishing to buy merchandise when they had not initially anticipated in doing so and do not have their wallet/purse/money clip in their possession. Yet in order to make purchases, a user must first swipe their band against a specially designed reader (Fig. 6) and subsequently enter a matching PIN number. Even if our malicious user had an RFID token that was a working clone of a legitimate one, it is somewhat unlikely he would be able to successfully guess the matching PIN number within a reasonable number of tries in one sitting before the cashier would begin to get suspicious.

While multifactor authentication certainly adds to the security of the system in a significant way, biometric  hardware is not flawlessly reliable. Florida is a rather humid place [5] which inevitably affects the performance of sensitive electronic hardware like fingerprint readers. To address this issue and counteract the likelihood of the system presenting users with false negatives, it would be fair to assume that the fingerprint readers themselves are configured to fail open (ie, when in doubt, allow entry). This gives malicious users the potential benefit of knowing that they merely need to intentionally cause the reader to malfunction to be granted access. Social engineering could also potentially play a factor in the exploitation of the MagicBand system by using Disney’s own customer-service policy against itself. Suppose our malicious user is successfully stopped dead in his tracks at the gate. He has been beaten to the entry gate by his victims and has lost the calibration race; there is no hope the machine will accept his cloned band. Yet he scans it anyway, and is denied access immediately. He knows he will not gain entry, but he continues to scan it. The employees at the gate attempt to help him, scanning his band for him, fiddling with the machine, etc, all to no avail. Yet a large line is beginning to form behind him.

Customers can place orders via an accompanying phone app, where they can either pick a recipe created by a professional mixologist, or devise their own concoctions.

Ratti told Dezeen that Nino is not intended to replace human bartenders; rather, he sees it as an opportunity to teach people how to interact with the machines that will almost certainly be part of their lives in the future.

he company says that these units have so far made more than 1 million drinks, sometimes serving as many as 800 cocktails per night.

training for employees

“We could have designed a very simple machine, but we wanted to design a pretty cool one, so that’s why [we added] the movement element,”

We could have designed a very simple machine, but we wanted to design a pretty cool one, so that’s why [we added] the movement element,”

Hotels, especially higher-end hotels with the most ambition, have delivered trenchant criticism of Oracle Hospitality for several years.

The tech brand’s flagship product is the property management system, or PMS, which stores a golden record on guest and room inventory data. Oracle’s various property management systems — including Opera, its best-known one — run at close to 40,000 properties.

Vukovic rattled off problems, such as expensive licensing fees, expensive integration costs, expensive onboarding of partners, and no phone number for customer support when there’s an integration hiccup.

Back in March, I wrote about how travel agents helped clients get home as walls of travel restrictions went up, and as airlines cut flights.

That story led a number of travel advisors to contact me, sharing their tales. With pictures of stranded travelers sleeping in airports still fresh in my mind, and thousands of others unable to get ahold of their airlines, I thought now would be a good time to remind you why it pays to use a travel advisor. From Classic Travel Connection in Birmingham, Alabama, Christen Perry recalled, “On March 11, during the middle of the President's speech to our nation regarding travel to and from Europe my team began making immediate contact with our clients who were still traveling in Europe.”

Closer to home, as millions of folks who booked direct were getting busy signals, Alexis Sherry of As Travel Pro was swinging into action. A family she had in the Dominican Republic were notified by their hotel that the airport was shutting down. Since they had used a travel advisor, as in real person, not an online screen bot, they had no problem getting through. After finding no flights available, Sherry contacted a private jet company, which arrived to pick the family up just seven hours after the hotel notified them of the shutdown. She also obtained a credit for the remainder of their interrupted stay.

While Vi-YO-Let, the product of a partnership with Denmark-based UVD Robots, might play cute tunes and light up as she moves, she has a serious job: disinfecting the air and surfaces around her. And she does so remarkably well: Her array of UV lights, which look like a bundle of lightsabers, kill more than 99 percent of viruses and bacteria, including the coronavirus.

More and more guests are requesting the robo-cleaning package

But as the pandemic rages into its second year, major brands are increasingly turning to the world of high-tech disinfection to strengthen their cleaning protocols

consumers rank dining out as one of the top three things they look forward to doing, along with socializing with friends and visiting family.

“Safety beats everything right now,” Li said.

What venues rank lowest, in terms of perceived safety? Cruise ships, restaurants with play areas for kids, buffet-style restaurants, and entertainment venues such as concerts and sporting events.   

Barry Fieldman Co-Managing Partner Smart Bar USA

The primary users of the SmarTender are cocktail servers and waiters/waitresses.

Today we have installations in movie theaters all over the U.S., including many Regal Cinemas. We have installed numerous units in hotel casino gaming properties (both American Indian gaming and non-American Indian gaming). The SmarTenders are deployed at service bars, pool cabanas, theaters and restaurants. We have also placed our SmarTenders in private suites at major stadiums including those for the Cleveland Indians and Minnesota Twins. Cruise lines are currently looking into using our machines as well. Portable SmarTenders are also currently utilized in banquet and catering halls.

Travel agents are even more important to luxury travelers, who ironically often think they know a lot about travel and rely on their own misguided sense of expertise. But while a good agent is so vital that it is simply foolish to plan a high-end trip on your own without one, they can also help travelers of all budgets.

pros of using an agent: “They can find crazy deals”; “They will be your advocate”; “They’ll take care of the little things”;