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Hyperdynamic pricing allows booking engines to automatically search social media, past user data, and even world news to display rates that maximize earning potential.

Improve revenue management and help save the environment with energy, water, and waste-monitoring tools.

Chatbot translators can quickly identify languages used by website visitors based on their location. They can also translate scripts on the fly and manage simultaneous guest inquiries from all over the world

AI is already changing the guest experience across the travel lifecycle, including the on-property experience

Consider chatbots for your hotel if you’d like to create consistent guest experiences and free up time for front desk staff to provide the best possible service for guests who are physically present. 

Hotels such as the Radisson Blu Edwardian in London and Manchester use artificial intelligence concierges to check guests in or out, order room service, and answer questions 24/7

Artificial intelligence is used in the hotel industry for revenue management, guest experience, and the automation of daily operations.

Cvent Passkey for Hoteliers uses smart technology to maximize the sales potential of existing business, improve the booking experience, and seamlessly organize all related departments.

Machine learning (a subset of AI) makes it easy to automatically collect, store, and analyze data from across a variety of online sources. 

"Wow" event planners with products such as Cvent Event Diagramming — an intuitive tool used to create 3D diagrams of event spaces.

Hilton and IBM teamed up to create Connie (named after Conrad Hilton), the first in-person customer service robot for hotels. The AI model can learn from guests and adapt over time while answering questions, fulfilling simple booking tasks, and improving its own speech over time. 

Hospitality recruiters are using machine learning to hire hotel employees in ways that go beyond the outdated resume model. Using personality profiles of existing team members and gamification-based tests, IHG and other top hotel brands have recruited thousands of employees. 

Keep an eye out for the tools, gadgets, and platforms that aren’t available now but are set to create a noticeable impact on the industry

Look out for passports with guest health information built in so medical professionals on or offsite can quickly access information such as their medical history, current medications, and allergies in an emergency.  Stay tuned for star ratings for hotel guests so properties can see information about their past stays. Look forward to robots as support staff to help ease the burden of late-night shifts and the effects of a high turnover industry. 

While AI robot concierges, room service delivery, and cleaning machines have the potential to replace 25% of today’s hospitality workforce, experiments such as Henn na Hotel in Japan

“Big data should be thought of as a new natural resource,” Deepak Advani, vice president of IBM Business Analytics Products

These and countless other questions can be answered by adopting big data techniques.

The modern GDS system evolved from this early labour-intensive manual system, thanks to the collaborative team efforts of American Airlines (AA) and IBM.  The result of that collaboration? The first airline industry mainframe-based system, SABRE.

Promotional messaging to agents through GDS cores like the most prominent airline national distribution systems (Amadeus, SABRE, Galileo, and Worldspan) alert agents to special rates, fares, and travel packages – an effective marketing tool for passing savings on to agents, and from agents to their customers. 

GDS booking has increased worldwide over the past 4 years yet some industry observers suggest that GDSs may become nearly obsolete by 2020. But like many technology/software-based systems, GDS may evolve, instead.

GDS is probably not going to fall into disuse any time soon. Rather, it will continue to evolve as it did from the Lazy Susan system of the 1950s.

Hotels need to think about multiple endpoints and the remote connections they rely on to run the property’s operations.

Take advantage of cybersecurity professionals who can identify sources of intrusion, assess the extent of the breach and provide details of the compromised material.

Caesars isn’t neglecting room service, though. Later this year, it intends to roll out at selected properties a new “food order tracker,” which will let guests see the progress on their order.

Caesars has taken a hybrid approach with Ivy, its virtual concierge text-messaging service, which is powered by vendor Go Moment.

Ivy users gave the properties approximately 10 points higher satisfaction scores.

Caesars is taking steps to build a data repository. It hired consulting agency Bluewolf, an IBM company, and Salesforce, which offers marketing platform services over the cloud, for one slice of the data centralization effort.

The company responded by changing its approach. The focus shifted from trying to generate revenue to trying to boost customer service.

Prosecutors said the 33-year-old ripped off Microsoft by manufacturing 28,000 counterfeit discs with the company’s Windows operating system on them. He was convicted of conspiracy and copyright infringement, which brought a 15-month prison sentence and a $50,000 fine.

A data centre is a facility used to house computer systems and their components, and it can be far and away the biggest contributor to an organisation’s carbon footprint. A data centre’s life expectancy is relatively long so it is imperative it is built to the highest standards in terms of efficiency as any excess energy use will lead to significant cost implications over the years.

1. Build the most energy-efficient data centre possible. This will save energy and costs over its lifespan. 2. Only get the data storage capacity that is currently required and forecast for the lifespan. Many data centres have excess capacity that burns energy (and therefore costs) unnecessarily. Don’t have servers or equipment that will not be used. 3. Cooling data centres. Traditionally cooling has been done by air circulation, which is very inefficient. Larger data centres already use other technologies to cool more efficiently, such as water cooling. 4. Virtualisation technology. Improve your system’s resource utilisation through virtualisation technology. Virtualisation is the creation of a virtual (rather than actual) version of something, such as an operating system, server, network, etc. and allows a single user to access several physical devices on one terminal. A computing device dedicated to an individual member of staff or allocated for one software application is highly inefficient and expensive. Virtualisation consolidates resources, requiring less power and cooling. 5. Consider cloud computing. This is a location-independent IT service, typically available over the internet, where shared servers provide resources, software and data to computers and other devices on demand, increasing IT capacity and capabilities without an organisation having to invest in new infrastructure. Keeping data virtually, or “in the clouds”, means less information stored on IT systems and therefore less energy being used to run the systems. Systems such as BT’s Virtual Data Centre, a hosted data centre that enables businesses to create, deploy, monitor and manage their own service through a self-service portal, claim to offer savings of up to 40% of the total cost of running one’s own data centre as well as reducing the space required, the level of emissions produced and the power consumed.

6. Measure and monitor power usage. Once you know what’s using the power, focus on why and whether it’s possible to reduce consumption.

1. Upgrade. Before buying new, investigate options to upgrade with the latest energy-efficient components to extend appliances’ working life and efficiency. 2. Green labels. Look out for the certification labels denoting more energy-efficient equipment, from Blue Angel in Germany to TCO in Sweden and Energy Star in the US (see below). 3. Screens. Opt for flat screen monitors, which reduce energy use by over two-thirds. 4. Get the right equipment. Consider your information technology needs against the tasks required. For example, laptops may be a better option in some circumstances because they have been developed to be energy-efficient and generally match the computer to the task required. Remember: not all staff have the same needs. 5. Consider running costs. Look at the life cycle costs, not just the purchase cost. Take note of running and standby costs of equipment. These can vary enormously.

Top 10 Tips to reduce running costs of office equipment (source: Carbon Trust) 1. Computers. Activate energy-saving features. In fact, most office equipment will have these features, so make sure they’re activated. 2. Standby features. Introduce a policy to activate standby features, don’t assume employees will do it. 3. Turn it off. Buy seven-day timers. These can save up to 70% on energy costs. 4. Monitor and manage the equipment that is peripheral to computers, such as speakers, printers, etc. and consider installing intelligent switch-off solutions. Printers can consume 30%-40% of their peak power demand when idling between printing and standby modes, so minimising this can produce cost savings, reduce heat output and increase its operating life. 5. Educate your staff. Consider a screen saver with an energy-saving message. 6. Rationalise your equipment via networking to reduce the number of printers (for example) in any office area. 7. Printers Use only black and white for internal documents and colour only when absolutely necessary. Consider the benefits of inkjet printers v laser printers. Inkjet energy use is much lower than that of a laser printer. Encourage staff to use print preview functions. Set default printing mode to double-sided. Use lower-specification printers, such as inkjets, for internal documents and encourage staff to use these for day-to-day use.

8. Photocopiers High volume copiers use more energy so should be used sparingly. Use low melting point inks (available from stationery suppliers). Encourage staff to copy in batches to increase standby time. Stick to black and white copiers and only use colour when absolutely necessary. Set default copying to double-sided. 9. Invest to save and purchase only what you need. 10. Don’t forget to motivate staff. Keep repeating the message of the importance of energy saving in ways that they can understand (for example, a computer monitor switched off overnight saves enough energy to microwave six dinners).

WEEE (Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment), or e-waste, is the term used for old or disposed electronic equipment. It covers both the toxic and valuable materials found in appliances. The most important lesson is to reuse, not recycle. With so much e-waste, and electrical devices such as computers and flat screens often being replaced well before the end of their shelf life and ending up in landfill, it’s imperative that the most is made of these materials by reusing them productively.

Options to investigate when trying to reduce e-waste are: 1. Can you upgrade your equipment with new energy efficient components? 2. Can it be used by someone else in the company? 3. Can it be given to a charity? (Note: charities must be registered to take WEEE.) 4. Will the manufacturer take back the old equipment and reuse parts in new products?

Developments on the horizon include: 1. Smaller, more efficient processors. The continuing development of microprocessors means a mobile phone can have around the same computational power as the average desktop computer back in 2000. 2. Memristors. Electronics giant HP is in the process of developing “memristors” (see photo above), which have greater memory storage capacity while requiring less energy and space. They are due to be on the shelf in about three years. 3. Specialist data centre design. Siemens recently launched its transformational Data Centre Solution, a groundbreaking strategy in data centre energy-efficient design and operation. It claims the system, which uses virtualization and efficient power and cooling, offers many benefits for businesses, including up to 50% energy savings through ground water cooling and IT costs reduced by 30%. 4. Outsourcing. Hotels of all sizes are starting to view IT outsourcing as a viable option to gain flexibility and reduce short-term costs and increase transparency of cost structures and processes. 5. Optimisation of resources. This will become a necessity either through virtualisation, networking or cloud computing. 6. Water cooling. IBM is currently working on a supercomputer that is cooled by water (a given volume of water can hold 4,000 times more waste than air), which claims to be 50% more energy efficient than the world’s leading systems. The Aquasar stacks many computer processors on top of each other with cooling water flowing between each one. IBM’s Dr Bruno Michel told the BBC in November 2010: “We plan that 10 to 15 years from now, we can collapse such a system into one sugar cube — we’re going to have a supercomputer in a sugar cube.”

PVNG supports one property or a large multi-brand, multi-property portfolio. PVNG uses the most current technology platform incorporating AP, AR, GL, Statistics, Financials, and a Bank Reconciliation, all with easy to use, familiar browser navigation.

Each of our properties is a separate entity and PVNG lets us provide separate financials for each,”

WalMart is pioneering massive data mining to transform its supplier relationships. WalMart captures point-of-sale transactions from over 2,900 stores in 6 countries and continuously transmits this data to its massive 7.5 terabyte Teradata data warehouse. WalMart allows more than 3,500 suppliers, to access data on their products and perform data analyses. These suppliers use this data to identify customer buying patterns at the store display level. They use this information to manage local store inventory and identify new merchandising opportunities. In 1995, WalMart computers processed over 1 million complex data queries. The National Basketball Association (NBA) is exploring a data mining application that can be used in conjunction with image recordings of basketball games. The Advanced Scout software analyzes the movements of players to help coaches orchestrate plays and strategies. For example, an analysis of the play-by-play sheet of the game played between the New York Knicks and the Cleveland Cavaliers on January 6, 1995 reveals that when Mark Price played the Guard position, John Williams attempted four jump shots and made each one! Advanced Scout not only finds this pattern, but explains that it is interesting because it differs considerably from the average shooting percentage of 49.30% for the Cavaliers during that game.

Cloud systems mostly sell on a subscription basis and don’t include any maintenance costs.

he amount of time taken for migrating to a cloud system is somewhere between 15 days to a month. When it comes to historic data, it can be easily saved and used for predictive insights.

cloud PMSs are generally super easy to learn and are designed thoughtfully. With clear and easy guidelines on how to perform tasks and usually dedicated account managers, the whole experience of maneuvering around the product is simplified.

With the number of organizations trusting their data with server services like AWS, Microsoft Azure, IBM cloud and even Google, you can rest assured that your data is in good hands

Certain cloud systems enable integrations to various third-party hospitality tools like channel managers, revenue management systems, ERPs, accounting and reputation management systems to name a few.

Cloud systems ensure that all these tools function in a well-controlled ecosystem and in sync with each other. It can also boil down to personal preference.

top event planning tools based on reviews from real users

Case studies and peer reviews are your best friend during this process.

Look for prices that are clearly stated or easy to obtain.

The tool is easy to use.

here are some online event management systems with reliable rave reviews, free or defined pricing structures, and user-friendly features to kick start your event planning process.

Cvent

Cvent’s event management platform automates and simplifies the entire planning process. Start with sourcing your venue and end with custom dashboards and reports after your event.

Social Tables

Social Tables brings you the best of venue sourcing, event diagramming, guest management, and check-in. The free event planning tools let you create to-scale diagrams in minutes. You can map out all the smallest details and share them with venues, clients, and collaborators. In addition, Social Tables helps you manage guests — from VIPs to special meal requests — and visually seat them in diagrams.Social Tables also creates award-winning platforms for hotels and venues, including CRM Software, Event Sales, and Event Services platforms.

Tripleseat

Tripleseat is the best event planning software for unique event venues. It’s a web app for sales and event management built mainly for restaurants, hotels, and venues.

You’re able to capture event leads, convert leads to bookings, create contracts and BEOs, and more. For event pros who are crazy about data, Tripleseat also gives you many reporting options to measure ROI.

Regpack

Use Regpack to customize registration forms and create unlimited attendee types. You can check in guests with a mobile device or let them check themselves in. You can even embed the software on your website’s sign-up page.

Event Mobi

Well-known enterprises like Intel, Motorola, IBM, and Johnson Johnson use Event Mobi. This event management tool lets you engage with guests before, during, and after the event.

Member Solutions

Member Solutions was originally created to process membership registrations, so it’s popular among fitness studios. Since it was founded in 1991, it has expanded to include various tools for planning events.

Caterease

Caterease simplified the catering portion of event planning. With Caterease, you can create visual menus for guests.

Fonteva

Fonteva lets you manage an unlimited number of events with a single annual fee. This service is especially popular in the hospitality industry. Westin Hotel, in fact, is one of its regular users.

. Hubb

If you’re a corporate conference manager, it might feel like you’re always chasing down programming info for your event.

Momice

Momice is an all-in-one event software that handles everything from registration to website building to event statistics.

DoubleDutch

DoubleDutch is all about community building. Their four-pronged strategy consists of designing delightful attendee experiences, future-proofing events themselves, facilitating high-volume event planning, and leveraging a network of partners.

When a returning loyalty member checks in, the room can automatically be set to their preferred temperature, play their favorite music and have the curtains wide open to enjoy the top-floor view, just as they like. Using AI and voice technology via in-room assistants further enhances the experience, enabling guests to manage their environments completely hands-free and avoid various touchpoints like the thermostat, light switches and the remote.

AI can also provide guests with the option to make requests for towels, pillows or food to be delivered to their rooms, outside the door without human contact. The Mercantile New Orleans uses a robot butler to deliver snacks, coffee or the morning newspaper to guests.

A recent AHLA survey found that 62 percent of guests consider cleanliness and safety protocols as their number two priority when choosing a hotel, compared to 38 percent of guests pre-COVID. Because of this, it is inherent upon hotels to implement new health and safety measures.

Verified Market Research, the market for UV disinfecting bots will grow to more than $5.5 billion by 2027.

在2015年，在信息存储产业联盟，包括惠普企业，IBM，甲骨文和Quantum，与学术研究团体的摆沿着一个组织，发布了它所谓的“国际磁带存储路线图。” 该预测预测，到2025年，磁带存储的单位面积密度将达到91 Gb /平方英寸。推算趋势表明，到2028年，它将超过200 Gb /平方英寸。

它应该以每年约33％的历史速度继续运行很多年，这意味着您可以预期容量大约每两到三年翻一番。可以将其视为磁带的摩尔定律。

尽管有所有这些优点，但公司使用磁带的主要原因通常是简单的经济学。磁带存储的成本是将相同数量的数据保留在磁盘上所需要支付的费用的六分之一，这就是为什么在几乎所有存储大量数据的地方都可以找到磁带系统的原因。

Disk drives are reaching their limits, but magnetic tape just gets better and better

Indeed, much of the world’s data is still kept on tape, including data for basic science, such as particle physics and radio astronomy, human heritage and national archives, major motion pictures, banking, insurance, oil exploration, and more. There is even a cadre of people (including me, trained in materials science, engineering, or physics) whose job it is to keep improving tape storage.

Tape has survived for as long as it has for one fundamental reason: It’s cheap. And it’s getting cheaper all the time. But will that always be the case?

Indeed, it should continue for many more years at its historical rate of about 33 percent per year, meaning that you can expect a doubling in capacity roughly every two to three years. Think of it as a Moore’s Law for magnetic tape.

But the rate at which data can be written to tape is, surprisingly enough, more than twice the rate of writing to disk.

To enable this degree of scaling, we had to make a bunch of technical advances. For one, we improved the ability of the read and write heads to follow the slender tracks on the tape, which were just 100 or so nanometers wide in our latest demo.

For example, in 2011, a flaw in a software update caused Google to accidentally delete the saved email messages in about 40,000 Gmail accounts. That loss occurred despite there being several copies of the data stored on hard drives across multiple data centers. Fortunately, the data was also recorded on tape, and Google could eventually restore all the lost data from that backup.

Trends tell us that a personalized experience isn’t enough anymore; guests today want a hyper-personalized guest experience. In order to provide one, hotels are going to have to think of new and innovative ways to collect data and then quickly and seamlessly use it to meet and exceed expectations. For example, Virgin Hotel Chicago adjusted its rewards program to be less of a rewards program and more of a preference program. In the program, appropriately called “The Know,” guests put in information about themselves in exchange for things like coupons to dine at the hotel’s restaurant. It gives them the chance to give dietary preferences, select what types of liquor they’d like in their mini bar, and what kind of cocktail they’d like waiting for them at check-in.

Smart Rooms & Self Service For The Win The “smart home” has left the bedroom and transitioned to the hotel room. Hotels of every shape and size are incorporating self-service capabilities that ‘smart’ technologies offer to meet the needs of their guests at every point of their stay.

Hotels like Hilton allow guests to check-in and set their room preferences -- from temperature to how dim or bright the lights should be -- before they arrive. By implementing self-service options, you help reduce wait times for guests trying to find information and request service.

Yotel is also embracing the digital revolution by allowing guests to check in via their airline-style kiosks. The kiosks, which are set up throughout the lobby, allow guests to avoid lines, select preferences, and set them up with their room quickly and easily. With studies showing that people estimate that they waste at least one hour a week waiting in lines, these self-service options not only alleviate waste times, but frustrations as well.

At the Godfrey Hotel in Boston, when you walk into a room, the television automatically syncs with your phone and loads your social media, Netflix, or Hulu account giving you easy access to all your favorite content. Meanwhile, in New York, the Renaissance is using its interactive digital concierge service to offer suggestions and information on restaurants and sights.

Real-time Communication Will Make Or Break You Of course, even with the introduction of new and exciting technologies that do some of the work for you, you still need to master the basics, such as communication. And today, this means real-time communication. Why, you ask? In December 2017, hotels on the Zingle platform received over 140,000 messages from guests. That’s roughly 4,500 messages a day that teams are fielding regarding everything from service needs, recommendations, complaints and general information inquiries. To handle this deluge of communication, savvy hotels leveraged 103,811 automated responses to answer some of the more common questions in a more efficient manner.

Prepare For A New Reality… That Includes Robots As time goes on, hotels are going to have to find ways to incorporate more immersive and interactive technology in order to provide better and more memorable experiences that differentiate themselves from their competitors. 2019 is poised to be a big year for virtual and augmented reality as hotels either find ways to incorporate it, or face the unhappy reality of losing guests.

From Hilton to Intercontinental, physical bots have joined their digital counterparts in entering the hospitality industry. However, hotel teams don’t need to panic about losing their jobs -- just yet. Nonetheless, they do provide real value for their ability to perform mundane, repeatable task that can free up staff to service guests elsewhere.

"Data breaches and the implications associated continue to be an unfortunate reality for today's businesses," Ponemon Institute Chairman and Founder Dr. Larry Ponemon said in a statement. "Year-over-year we see the tremendous cost burden that organizations face following a data breach.”

Cybersecurity incidents stemming from insider threats will include private or sensitive information being unintentionally exposed, customer records being compromised or stolen, and employee records being compromised or stolen.

PVNG lets us remotely pay our vendors and coordinate the A/P workflow with our GMs. Our VP looks at all payments and invoices personally and can approve them remotely on her tablet from wherever she is. Remote cloud financial management was a major factor in our PVNG decision.

PVNG also lets us compare Hilton’s property reports with Horizon Hospitality’s budgeting and expense data

Our executive team works late and travels, and PVNG lets them oversee operations wherever they are. Even with CV19 taking place, PVNG lets our executive team work more efficiently to serve our properties and investors.”

Aptech VP Cam Troutman said, “Horizon Hospitality’s team is doing a great job of leveraging mobile technology to operate its properties during CV19’s impact on business. Aptech is happy to support the creative management processes Horizon implemented with PVNG. We are proud of how Horizon is handling the current issue.”

When we deployed Aptech’s PVNG Enterprise Accounting this February we did not plan for a pandemic, but PVNG has been instrumental in our business continuity because now we can oversee financial performance and effectively manage operations remotely