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Apps are taking over the world, no matter what industry or location. The hospitality industry is no exception, and whether you’re a hotel owner, café manager, barista, wait staff member or patron, there is an app out there that makes your life easier. Here are a few apps that are examples of innovation in the hospitality industry.

OneTab This app is the future of bar tabs. OneTab allows patrons to set up a tab, track its progress, and pay it off at the end of the night seamlessly. It doesn’t get much easier than that, for both vendors and patrons!

Staffing roster nightmares are a thing of the past. This app allows managers and staff to set and access their rosters so everybody knows where and when they need to work.

One of the latest trends to impact hotel marketing and the guest experience is the iBeacon, which sends a Bluetooth push notification to guests’ mobile devices when they come within close proximity of the iBeacon. This presents an opportunity for on-the-spot guest marketing. Beacon technology is the key to improving guests’ experiences. It can help you streamline check-in and check-out, guide guests around the property, and notify them about targeted offers at your restaurant, bar, or spa.

Beacons are a super effective source for gathering customer insights. By measuring things such as dwell times, how much time guests spend at certain areas in the hotel, and which areas of the hotel are the most popular during specific hours of the day, hotels can plan reward offers accordingly.

Beacons also are useful in measuring and enhancing staff productivity. For instance, beacons can alert housekeeping staff to service a room when the guest is out or to not disturb a guest when she is in the room. No more door hangers!

the best known global CRSs are AMADEUS, GALILEO, SABRE, and WORLDSPAN with AMADEUS being the only one which is largely owned by European airlines. Together with GALILEO, it is the leading system in the European market. GALILEO, however, also has a strong position in the US market after it merged with an American system. SABRE and WORLDSPAN have been developed in the US. So far, SABRE is the only CRS which is wholly owned by one single airline.

CRSs are systems for purely (information transfer) logistical functions

he network of the global CRS AMADEUS has additional 14 network nodes distribers who thus have the latest information about availability at any point in time and can use it as a basis for a new offer. In addition, the system can also store customer related information such as e.g. all services provided to a certain customer, type of payment, service information etc. ♦ Fare Quote & Ticketing: Just like the product presentation, the fare quote, ticketing and voucher generating process depend on the type and the complexity of the services offered. For flights, multiple fares are being offered which differ according to the reservation category, the date of the journey, the day when the reservation was made, the route and the length of the stay. That means that practically each fare needs to be calculated individually. In addition, fare quotes can change daily. The prices of other service providers, however, are relatively fixed so that in most cases, they stay an unchanged part of the offer. For the ticketing, travel agencies receive a fixed number of ticket forms which may only be used after confirmation has been availability of particular reservation categories and possibly the fare. It may, however, be difficult to describe the products of other service providers appropriately with only a limited amount of information. Hotels, for example, have so far only been able to provide information about the price, the size of the bed and its approximate location which alone is not a meaningful description for potential customers. For this reason, it is intended to link the particular offers to visual multimedia technology to be able to provide more detailed information to the customer. ♦ Reservation: The core function of reservation systems and the main reason for developing them is the reservation of offered services in the travel industry. To this end, a so called Passenger Name Record (PNR) or Guest Name Record (GNR) is created for each passenger or each group of passengers. These records contain all services-related customer information. At the same time, this information is transferred to the internal inventory system of all service providFigure 2 Principel structure of CRSs N N P pr S Fare Quote and T Hotel- or Car-Systems Travel Agencies Tourism Tourism Tourism Tourism Stickynote

have to compare flight costs on every reservation website or call each airline separately

American Airlines airfares can no longer be found on Expedia or Orbitz websites, or any site powered by Orbitz.

American suggests that distribution companies begin using Direct Connect, powered by Farelogix

Fuelled by technology and the immense power of the Internet of Things (IoT), consumer expectations are growing. This is true within every industry and in none more so than the hotel sector. In an industry where customer expectations for a positive experience run particularly high, technology may just provide the means for overcoming this challenge.

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.

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.

Now payments company Square, which owns delivery service Caviar, has put together what it hopes will be the painkiller product that restaurants have been craving: a dedicated point-of-sale system and corresponding software for full-service and quick-service restaurants that integrates offline and online sales.

Square for Restaurants aims to appeal to both mom-and-pop businesses and, over time, to chains.

But convincing multi-location businesses to adopt a new payments system is a tall order, because of the associated switching costs.

Plate IQ has cozied up with Square, announcing on Tuesday (May 15) an integration with the new Square for Restaurants service.

The deal involves Plate IQ’s daily sales software, which enables restaurants to “automatically input guest payment data from Square for Restaurants into many existing accounting software platforms and create valuable summaries of daily transactions, alleviating the typical manual-entry demands placed on general managers,” according to a Plate IQ press release.

The integration also will let restaurant workers “automatically attribute daily sales to the correct general ledger account for more accurate and detailed bookkeeping,” review revenue from various locations on a single screen and see real-time sales and purchasing data, allowing restaurant operators to estimate their cost of goods sold.

This means that hotels can be completely in charge of their own energy – and financial – output without compromising any part of a guest’s experience. It’s the technology that makes this all happen, however.

60% of travelers make eco-friendly choices when booking hotels and 50% say they are willing to pay more for an environmentally friendly location.

LEED-certified hotels obtain superior financial performance compared to their non-certified competitors for at least the first two years after certification.

A good cloud-based property-management system should be more secure than the typical server-based systems located on property because it is hosted in an environment that is managed by people whose sole job is to keep it secure.

Cloud-based data centers should be tested and audited to ensure they meet certain standards

On-premises and cloud-based systems are susceptible to the same security issues if not properly managed,

When the organizers of Intuit’s QuickBooks Connect conference initially decided to use near-field communication (N.F.C.) technology on attendee badges for this year’s event, which was held October 22 to 26 at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center in California, they had several goals in mind.First, they wanted to automate the process of tracking continuing education credits for the attendees; second, they wanted to make it easy for vendors to track leads at their booths; and third, they wanted a way for attendees to gather information from vendors and sessions electronically, rather than in paper form.

And then they came up with an additional function: Due to the event’s growth, Intuit had to spread the 112 exhibitors across two halls for the first time this year. N.F.C. created a fun way to ensure the more than 5,000 small business owners, accountants, and developers in attendance would spend time in both halls.

By using the N.F.C. technology in this game-like way, O’Brien said it helped attendees become comfortable with the new technology. “We wanted to teach that the value was beyond the exhibit hall,” she said. “We wanted there to be ‘delight’ reasons to scan, so there was the kiosk or to get pictures.” The N.F.C. was integrated into the event app, which O’Brien said had a 91 percent adoption rate this year, much higher than at the 2015 event.

The Rainmaker Group today announced that the integration between RoomKeyPMS and revintel®

The Spectator Hotel, a boutique property in Charleston, SC, managed by Charlestowne Hotels.

Thanks to revintel, revenue managers can better understand their portfolio's health by property, agent, or market in comparison to past performance

Marriott International, which used VR as part of its “Travel Brilliantly” campaign

tech-savvy millennials, who are projected to make up over 50% of the world’s hotel guests by 2020

52% of interviewees believe that VR will be used in the booking process by 2025. 2/3 say this would enhance their experience. 45% of customers would visit hotels more often if they offered this service.

25 percent of all food passing through kitchens gets thrown out

Set real benchmarks to achieve goals.

leak detection systems are installed in only 21 percent of hotel properties

occupancy sensors and LED lighting