Group items tagged

Wi-Fi in the walls at the Mandarin Oriental New York

there’s wireless Internet in the walls

The hotel group has contracted Ruckus Wireless to install its Wi-Fi wall switches for all 248 guest rooms in its flagship New York City hotel, citing “explosive demand” for wireless capacity.

having an IP telephone in a standard guest room is becoming the norm, rather than the exception

Today, let's focus on the hotel/hospitality market, and their shift away from traditional telephony. As with any new technology, some examples in the "market" are quicker to adopt new technology earlier than others. What drives this interest and migration to new technology? It's usually competition.

As these devices become cheaper, it's only practical for the hospitality industry to move away from traditional telephony. Analog telephony is becoming a liability. Maintaining thousands of feet of cable, supporting two cable plants (voice and data), is becoming a thing of the past.

HeBS digital Blog Archive for the ‘Online Travel Agencies (OTAs)’ Category The OTA Billboard Effect or the Lazy Man’s Approach to Hotel DistributionMonday, August 1st, 2011 The following article is Max Starkov’s latest contribution to the “Successful eMarketing” blog on HOTELS magazine’s website The existence of the so-called billboard effect is not a new marketing phenomenon. It has existed long before the online channel became a reality. As confirmed by many studies, any marketing exposure by a hotel produces a billboard effect:  when you launch a banner advertising campaign; when you purchase a full-page ad in the New York Times travel section; when you launch a paid search campaign on Google, etc. The OTA Billboard Effect Lately Expedia reps have been aggressively using a new Cornell Hospitality Report, namely “Search, OTAs and Online Booking: An Expanded Analysis of the Billboard Effect” to convince hoteliers that they should use Expedia in order to generate more bookings from the hotel’s own website due to the so-called “Billboard Effect.” The Cornell Report, based on data from Expedia and InterContinental Hotel Group (IHG) from 2008-2010, is a continuation of a previous report on the subject, heavily supported by Expedia. The report’s analysis determined that when an IHG property was listed on the first results page of Expedia, this created an increase of between 7.5% and 14.1% in bookings for the same property on IHG’s own brand website. In other words, this is a confirmation for Expedia’s billboard effect, which hoteliers should take into consideration when griping against the 25% plus merchant OTA commission. When these “billboard effect bookings” are taken into consideration, Expedia’s commission “would effectively be reduced to single digits,” states the Cornell Report. Hoteliers, rejoice! We have found the perfect recipe for success: we do nothing as far as marketing the property website is concerned. Instead, we plaster Expedia with our sales promotions and wait for the travel consumers to come to our own website and book. As discussed, the billboard effect is not strictly an OTA territory. In my view, the Cornell Hospitality Report is a one-sided research project, very proactively supported by Expedia, similar to the first report on the billboard effect published in 2009. Cornell, the finest hospitality institution in the U.S., should know better than to come up with this half-baked “scientific” research, which does not account for the complexities of hotel distribution as well as the “digital information cloud” we all live in and the resulting marketing and distribution channel convergence which directly affects the purchasing habits of today’s hyper-interactive travel consumers. This report makes conclusions that do not take into account, among many other things, the following: Complex Travel Planning Patterns in Hospitality Many surveys show that people are shopping around on a number of hotel and travel websites before narrowing down their search. Typically in hospitality, these sites include a hotel search on a search engine e.g. Google (65% market share), an OTA website, TripAdvisor, the hotel’s own website, etc. Therefore jumping from an OTA website to a hotel branded website and vice versa is at least partially due to particular travel research patterns unique to the users and not due to the so-called billboard effect: Step 1: “I always search on Google first where I identify a property I like” Step 2: “I go to Expedia and see what the rate for this property is” Step 3: “I visit TripAdvisor to read my peer reviews for this hotel” Step 4: “I visit the hotel website and book if I like the location, rate and what I have read and seen about this hotel”

Hotel Concepts–Brilliant, a leading global provider of technology and software solutions for the hospitality industry, has unveiled the future of enterprise lodging systems—the revolutionary iTesso solution. Ideal for hotel chains of all sizes, scalable and customizable, iTesso will be exhibited during HITEC 2012, at booth # 1222. One of the hospitality industry’s first true end-to-end cloud-based management systems, iTesso is an integrated property management system, distribution platform and central reservations system all rolled into a single intuitive solution. As a component-based hotel chain inventory and distribution management system, iTesso can be deployed as a direct connection between a hotel's CRS and the global distribution systems and alternate distribution systems, or as a distributed multi-property PMS with links to third-party CRS systems. In short, iTesso represents a brilliant new concept in technology convergence.

The interface connections are monitored and upgraded on a hotel and a centralized level. This offers hotel users unique value from the high degree of scalability and redundancy, something that is rarely economically feasible with a premise-based solution. Moreover, the Windows Azure platform is completely secure and reliable, with critical encrypted information redundantly stored at two data centers with seamless switching.

The hotels’ target market consists of highly accomplished, technology-savvy guests who expect the world’s best business tools, room amenities, and business services.

They envisioned using advanced video, collaboration, and networking technologies to create a unique and exciting experience throughout the property, delighting leisure travelers and providing world-class collaboration capabilities for business travelers.

The venture would require exquisitely coordinated interactions between high-bandwidth wired and wireless networks, multiple business video and collaboration applications, and endpoints such as video displays and IP phones.

Mobile device as door key

Some hotels have already starting using implementing this, whether it involves NFC technology or visually scanning a code like many airports now do with plane tickets.

Service automation

Embracing sustainable practices is not a new phenomenon. The concept of sustainability was first mentioned in 1987 on an international platform with the UN-sponsored Brundtland Commission’s unveiling of “Our Common Future,” a movement that has since transgressed the globe.i

In 1996, three organizations, the World Travel & Tourism Council, the World Tourism Organization, and the Earth Council converged to create a global environmental certification program for the travel and tourism industry.

Of course, it is the right thing to do considering global warming and the focus on preserving the planet

To me, the most important problem we are trying to address is that it takes too long to deploy new capabilities to the field," Peddicord said. "So if we accept the idea that we can't predict the future and that we need to be agile, we need to be able to adapt our systems to a changing environment, then we need to build them differently. We need to do something different so we can drop in new capabilities rapidly."

It’s hard to believe the impact that technology has had on all of us, including the accounting profession.

Over the years, accounting firms got on board with websites, which allowed them to market differently and far more effectively. Personal client portals were introduced by Thomson Reuters in 2001, effectively eliminating geographic constraints for firms. With portals, they could serve clients 24x7, regardless of location, and communicate and collaborate far better than they could previously. The Web, mobile and social media have had an enormous impact on how firms can operate today. Social marketing has proven to be very effective in many firms. Audits have changed radically. Now they can be done online, with content also accessed online. We can research anywhere, anytime as well.

The next 20 years will see even more dramatic change for the profession. Artificial Intelligence (AI), cognitive computing/machine learning, natural language processing and blockchain are the hot topics today – of course, converging with big data.

the total mass of electronic waste generated by Americans has been declining since 2015

The biggest contributor to this decline is the disappearance of the large, bulky cathode-ray tube (CRT) televisions and computer monitors from American homes,

“If you look at the state laws that exist in many places for e-waste recycling, many of them set their targets based on product mass,” she says. As the overall mass of e-waste declines, meeting those targets becomes more difficult. Moreover, says Babbitt, the main goal of these regulations had been to keep electronics with high levels of lead and mercury out of landfills, where they can eventually leach into the surrounding environment. But these days, a more pertinent concern is how to recover elements like cobalt (used in lithium-ion batteries) or indium (found in flat-panel displays). These elements aren’t as environmentally toxic; rather, they are relatively scarce in the Earth’s crust, so failing to recapture them for reuse in new electronics is wasteful. “The e-waste recycling system is somewhat backwards-looking,” says Babbitt; it has struggled to keep pace with the changing nature of electronics.

The hospitality sector has long recognized the value of technology as a catalyst to providing outstanding guest experiences and reducing operational inefficiencies. Technology is so important to the overall mission of many locations that, despite softening IT budgets in 2017, 52 percent of hotels planned to increase their IT investments while 47 percent planned to spend the same as the previous year

The type of technology a location spends its IT dollars on is becoming even more critical, as changing consumer attitudes and expectations continually raise the bar for excellent guest services.

Five technologies in particular—service automation, fixed mobile convergence, location-based services, connected meeting rooms, and chatbots and mobile apps—are poised to change the guest experience and create areas of opportunity for hospitality locations to become differentiators and innovators in an already technology-centric industry.

This article will examine the roots of this e-business movement and the key challenges it creates for managers who must move rapidly to adapt to the new competitive forces of the network era.

1. MOBILE DEVICES AS DOOR KEYS

2. SERVICE AUTOMATION

Since the new technology has created more automation, both guests and hotel workers can spend more of their time focusing their efforts on other activities.

That's the beauty of proximity engagement. Not to be confused with location-based marketing, proximity engagement is about engaging your customer with a message they will actually want, not simply sending them the message you want them to get.

The aforementioned study also found that only 39% of respondents said they would keep an app for more than six months, with 28% admitting they deleted an app after using it. So, if offering an engaging app is the way to your customers' hearts, you need to figure out how to get them to keep yours on their phones.

The first one was invented in 1879 by an American shopkeeper James Ritty.

developed by IBM in 1973 – and it marked the first commercial use of a computer-based system used by the restaurant industry. 

POS terminals in its restaurants in 1984