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This article introduces the 2016 Smart Decision Guide to Hotel Property Management Systems, which analyzes imperical data collected to determine the best PMS system to use to ensure a successful hotel business.

This article makes me very proud, as I work for 1 Hotel South Beach and know that this Hotel definitely practices what they preach. They have been awarded LEED Silver (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) which was developed by the U.S. Green Council (USGBC). The hotel has a very unique and simple design. The guest rooms are designed with left over construction materials from its surrounding resources. The use of wood, natural material, leather, and stone, silk, linen, cotton are what make our facility so earthy and green. 1 Hotel hopes to start a trend in the Hotel industry by following the sustainable practices that our Hotel makes. More than 82,000 commercial institutional projects are actively participating in LEED. This is huge! and means that the trend 1 Hotel has started is being adopted by other companies.

This article discusses the hospitality industry's developing technology sector, claiming an age of interconnectivity. This industry has long been plagued by the stereotype of being behind technologically, largely due to long standing and set-in ways that utilize old systems. A few numbers worth mentioning include enterprise hospitality spending an average of 3.5 percent of revenue on IT versus 7.9 percent for financial services, 6.1 percent for public sector, and 5.9 for high tech. In a study done by Lodging Technology Study, 53 percent of hoteliers cited that the outdated tech architecture set-in and the effort it would take to change them is what keeps people from investing in new technologies. Fortunately since then, this sector has been gaining momentum, expecting to be the fastest growing IT sector between 2018 and 2021. The article continues on talking about the barrier of integration fees and how tech innovators today are forced to pay massive fees to be compatible with existing systems, which carry on to consumers of these technologies. For hoteliers to utilize these new technologies, large sums of money have to be paid upfront and there's a significant lag in actually getting to try the product. The rest of the article discusses a few points we do in this week's module: pros and cons to two-way interconnectivity in PMS systems and third party technology providers.

This article examines how internet marketing is affecting the success rates and occupancy of bed and breakfast establishments in Canada. Though implementation of technologies and by various methods such as Search Engine Optimization, it enables small businesses to drive brand awareness, increase customer base and accelerate lead generation. By the use of internet based technology the success and efficiency rates can be tracked through various analytics tools, helping marketers adjust their strategy accordingly. Internet marketing is recognized as a cost-efficient tool to boost customer awareness quickly, and can be used by large and small businesses alike. Through implementing internet based technology, business owners are also able to receive instant feedback about their products and services from customers and gives them a chance to take corrective action in any areas that need improvement.

There are various forms of e-marketing, and this particular article zooms into the principle of e-marketing through social media influencers, or in other words, social media celebrities. Social media celebrities have a significant amount of followers and dictate what is good, negative, fun, popular, or high quality in different segments- food, places to go, accessories, brands, and etc. They have the power to engage their audience and influence favoritism through their postings. These people often have a large number of followers and provide audiences with an insight of their private and social lifestyle. This article highlights the importance of capturing social media influencers because it can be a great way to market the property. According to this article, traditional form of advertising, or marketing, is no longer becoming as effective. Social media influencers have far more power than businesses believe. It is important, before a business dives in to capture a social media influencers interest, to dictate whether or not the influencers' number of followers are "real" and not "bought." Usually influencers will have a number over 50,000 followers, and a micro-influencer will have an average between 1,000 and 50,000 followers. The key to distinguish if these followers are "real" is through active engagement from the audience. The ultimate goal of a hotel is to have influencers visit their property, utilize their services, take beautiful pictures and add positive and descriptive captions, geotag location of the business, and finally, tag the hotel they are visiting. It should enable followers to easily click on the link or look up the property, so they too, can experience what their influencer has experienced. It is important that both parties adhere to the standards conformed by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). It is an absolute must for influencers to include in their post that they are being compensated for sharing the experience.

MODULE 5: This article is about a new booking site was created for individuals who prefer to book hotels that are committed to sustainable practices. Travel Management Companies (TMCs) has worked with BookDifferent.com in launching its Corporate Travel Tool and consumers are able to see the different properties' carbon footprint. This new site offers approximately 1.1 million accommodations with more than 7,000 eco-certified properties. The Corporate Travel Tool works like an add-on feature for TMCs that creates a seamless process for booking properties that can reduce the consumers environmental footprint. Most recently BookDifferent.com has received the 2018 Sustainable Travel Award this past January in the Netherlands.

This article highlights how several large chain hotels have taken on the initiative to reduce/eliminate their resource and energy consumption to sustain their communities for tourism. The four main steps taken include: saving the coral reefs, energy and water conservation, preserving food and repurposing waste, and creating eco- minded communities. Hotels have taken on a number a projects such as creating underwater structures to preserve and enhance the coral reefs for guests experience, filtering water from the local river, starting a food waste program to turn left over food items into reusable water, and hosting seminars to discuss sustainability and clean ups to name a few.

Three years ago Oracle was able to buy out the leading company in hotel and restaurant technology, Micros. But the transition was quite tough on the company leaving many customers dissatisfied with the service they were receiving. One reason for this is because Oracle was not used to call-center based customer service making it quite difficult for them to adapt on their side but it was also difficult for the customers to adapt to taking all their data online to the cloud. In order to keep happy customers Oracle was able to boost the number of customer service representatives which made each and every customer have a shorter wait time and also the they are able to serve more customers as well. Oracle has also taken the step into streamlining the agreements with their customers into one global agreement making the service across the board on the same level, they were able to get more companies on the cloud, they were able to reduce training time by making the systems more user friendly and also have changed the PMS system to be on separate hardware such as tablets. They have also decided not only to focus on the hardware and IT aspect, but make it possible for hotels to give the best experience possible by adding more tools to track guest information but also for revenue and accounting management. At the time there are still many opposers to the systems and are being voices by many General Managers of the world but with the improvements they are bound to please more customers.

This article talks about hotels investing and implementing micros as their main system.

For three years now, Oracle has been the owner of Micros, a software that manages payments and reservations for more than 300,000 hospitality owners. This article speaks on how Oracle has been handling the transition, and the obstacles they are facing now, including competition from other hospitality softwares that hotels around the world are using. Most softwares today are using cloud based systems, but Oracle was having some mishaps with that transition, therefore making customers unhappy. To relieve some of the tension between customers and the company, there hired about 30% more representatives to handle the volume of requests, and questions from Oracle users. With more research and more representatives, 70% of customer support requests are being resolved within an hour. With time of the essence in the hospitality world, this is an important aspect for users of the system. Competition is out there, and price is a large factor for small and family owned businesses that cannot afford the Oracle system, but they are now working on widening their marker to independently owned hotels from anywhere around the globe. Being a user of Micros in my own place of work, the computer software makes it easy for both the employee and the guests, with straightforward prompts and payments that deliver little to no hassle. Oracle would like to keep on growing and with the rate that they have overcome their mishaps and learned to adapt to new technologies such as ApplePay and Bitcoin, it seems it can only go up from here.

This article emphasizes the positive and negative aspects of the hospitality industry adopting to sustainable practices. It recognizes that this industry is in the business of making money, while appoints the importance of doing so conscientiously, respecting the environment. It shows the steps that the organizations should take on its journey to action. I believe that sustainability should be a business imperative and not a lifestyle choice, as the sustained interest among consumers in tourism products and services are continuously increasing. That should be beneficial for the organization, positively affecting the operating revenue.

The article discusses the many ways the IT world is finding new ways to be sustainable in the hospitality industry. Changing the way a hotel runs by introducing e-mails to guest and other companies to reduce the paper flow or allowing guest to do mobile check-ins can reduce a lot of paper waste. Also, having guest use their phones as key cards for their rooms can aid in avoiding wasting and needing to create key cards. By hotels having an energy saving system, they reduce electrical waste by having computers on low power consumption mode. One main thing the article mentioned that I personally see a lot of hotels doing is digital advertising. Instead of relying on paper advertisement, hotels rely heavily on ads on social medias, facebook, google, and third party vendors.

This article discusses the IT green movement that has been in action since the rise of technology and ways on how IT can go green. Some opportunities in the green IT movement include the following: - Using IT responsibly and effectively to reduce water, energy, and paper consumption. This gives IT teams to take advantage of a few technical enhancements within their hotels to provide key cards available on smart phones, email to reduce paper, and digital signage. - Deploying effective technology practices such as Energy Star compliance to shut down computers automatically after periods of inactivity and server virtualization. This would mean for everything to be on one common server, and companies can save money on computer hardware and power consumption. - Tackling e-waste and deploying recycling technologies to reduce environmental waste and impacts. This could be implementing by introducing a safe recycling system for used hardware. - Digital marketing practices. This could be like using digital media to save money or using social media to encourage guests about the green practices that the hotel is implementing. - Marketing strategies to report and promote green practices. This could be having the business properly use marketing strategies to target these environmentally conscious market and find ways to promote green practices to this market segment. These are all very effective ways for IT teams to go green within their hospitality businesses. These green IT projects will need approval from top management and investment in time and resources.

As technology advances so does the way consumers buy products and services. In order to keep consumers happy the hospitality industry has adapted itself to be more mobile and convenient. Mobility and convenience are two very important factors when making a website or app for E-Commerce. Many hotels and restaurants have created apps for cell phones and tablets so that guest can have convenience and mobility when booking a reservation or ordering a meal. E-Commerce profitability is maximized by using digital marketing. Two major sources for digital marketing are search engines and social media ads. Through digital marketing companies can constantly advertise to consumers anywhere at anytime in a cost efficient manor. Search engine marketing allows companies to increase the number of visitors to their website by putting them at the top of search engine results.

To summarize this article, it mainly discussed how the layout of digital marketing within the hospitality industry is constantly changing and highly important. This is something that is a challenging task for most hospitality businesses, especially hotels. It was said that there are many factors/questions to consider when approaching digital marketing such as " How much does it cost to acquire a new guest and how do we encourage this new guest to book directly through a brand's website?" Websites are plays a vital role in digital marketing are one of the main starting points. Hotels and other hospitality businesses should be frequently updating websites with useful information that compliments more visuals such as images and videos. In addition to that, it was even mentioned how making sure that the website is easy to navigate and readily accessible to customers is essential. After carefully reading more into article, SEM (Search Engine Marketing) was mentioned. This is more like an assessment in a way and a method to show where a hotel or business stands as a brand. For example, if your were to simply google the word hotel, brands such as Marriott and Hilton would most likely be at the top of the list. That is actually good and will benefit those brands greatly in the aspect that there reputation, which possibly stems from online review sites and social media platforms, is well known. These online review sites are capable of monitoring and responding to customer inquiries/comments. The article also touched basis on how the demand of social media presence is vital and should not be overlooked. Social media proves to be cost effective and efficient. Simply using hashtags with either the brand name or keywords can attract prospective customers which in return will generate more revenue. Overall, the article was clear that as far as the hospitality industry goes, digital marketing is something that has evolved in so many ways and can generate good revenue if the plan

Digital marketers in the hotel industry are adapting to the changing climate for OTA's guest expectations, advertising, and competition. Hotel Websites must be clean, low text, and image based with opportunities for guest to comment or ask questions. How to guests find you online? How can we create strategic links from the website to a brand's social channels for increased retention? Business owners will need to learn search engine marketing (SEM) to ensure that sites appear high on listed results of search engines. Paid advertising and Geo-targeting advertisement will be essential in offering the right products to the right markets. Markets must set measurement goals to monitor performance at different stages of ad campaigns and decided if ads should be adjusted. Lastly, the social media craze is still going strong, and being aware of current trend such as Instagram and hashtaging will be crucial in for current success.

The articles talks about trends in Point of Sale systems, with new software and devices that offers more options such as mobile use, customer preference tracing, and table management.

This article talks about how Airbnb has become more appealing to travelers than hotels. Airbnb has become one of the largest hospitality networks offering cheaper stays and more authentic experiences than hotels. However, hotels are not liking this as people are more likely to turn to Airbnb's. There have been many regulations that hotels are forced to face while Airbnb's have close to no regulations, making it easier to earn an income without any specific regulations. Airbnb's have caused hotels to turn to different methods of gaining more customers while competing against such a strong competition.

Its interesting that hotels and hotel chains have spent so much time effort and money on implementing standards and standardization over the past decade. AirBNB has limited standards other than the provision of accommodation. Standards were introduced as a tactical approach to consumer market by providing standardized and recognizable brand standards so that a traveler will know they staying in a Marriott for example. AirBNB success has turn that assumption on its head as travelers embrace differentiated product more related to finding a personalized choice that suits their personal tastes based on a more varied product offering. Hotel have been discussing personalization as a high level topic for many years now, more related to services and experience. Could it be that the success of AirBNB is actually an oversight of the hotel industry (perhaps explaining the significant increase in "Brands" by the largest hotel companies.) on the desire for travelers for personal spaces that are closer to the desires of the consumer.

This article summarizes the evolution of technology in the hospitality industry over the years. They go into detail with SABRE which was created in the 1960s which was the first computerized reservation system. Being able to book online allows for many customers to be reached. For example, in 2007 nearly 40 million households book travel online and pending $86 billion on airline tickets, lodging, cars, intercity rail, cruises, and packages. These vast advancements in technology enables globalization of brand awareness. E-commerce encourages economic growth with accessibility, collaboration, automation, functionality, and flexibility.

This article explains the way the hospitality industry is responding to the Corona virus crisis using digital and online capabilities. One obvious support that the industry is giving to the response efforts is by providing beds to respond to the emergency cases in the crisis like in the examples of Cloudbeds working with Sabre, Marriott, and RateGain and Hotels for Helpers, in the Netherlands which is offering discounted hotel rooms for those in need. The hospitality industry are also adapting to the crisis by finding online solutions for their employees to work from home and also providing wide range of resources on the crisis for users.

The first products distributed by GDS was hotel lodging reservation system, such as different types of rooms, description and price categories with the airline system. GDS has been increased on the travel market, such as number of flights. Travel Agencies (TA) also use GDS to offer complimentary products, such as car rental, hotel and other related forms of accommodation, bus tickets, vacation tickets, yacht rides and even flowers and champagne,That means, GDS has become more important distribution channel for nay product through TA. Also TA had more opportunity of more products their own system and GDS system from increase number of booking volume with lower operating costs. It was the first and major goals of GDS being used in the hospitality industry. Even though hopitality ingustry use GDS system, there are few problems, such as show only simple structure. For example, there are 4 different kinds od room and 3 categories od comfort, it means they have 12 different kinds of combination. Because of the GDS database structure, only there 12 combination could be displayed. It took a while to fit all the multiple types of comport rates, rooms and services in GDS standard database structure. Instead of choosing GDS system, they cans choose other alternative system with develop several computerized system to make a database structure closer to product specification. Nowadays, GDS using all of the hospitality industry from reservation hotel rooms to car rentals and Travel Agencies. Through GDS as globally, people are able to to book different kinds of hotel rooms in different destination all around the world, tours, airline seats, cruises and eeve limousines.

Looking at these numbers it becomes very clear how important GDS are to the hospitality industry, more rooms booked means increased revenues and more jobs for hospitality professionals. I am sure that this technology will evolve and transform so it is important to stay current and understand how to get the most out of it.

What's global distribution system? This question is kind of cliché in our group, but this article gives a very good introduction about GDS and it's quite easy to understand comparing to many other articles introducing GDS. This article tells us: How GDS develops from being used only in airline industry to being generally adopted in hospitality industry; What is the working idea behind the GDS; Four major GDS including Amadeus, Galileo, Sabre and Worldspan; Advantages provided by GDS.

Hotels POS systems are at risk for customers. Hackers are using tactics like Phishing and ransomware. Hotels must take action and arm themselves with a "toolbelt" of security options to combat the hackers.

This article explores the issues with cyber security in the hotel industry. it is to be taken seriously because customer information is on the line and so is the company's reputation and revenue. Hotels must look into their POS systems because, according to the article, is a weak security point. However, it holds much of the consumer's information like credit card numbers, expiration dates, and etc. The POS system is vulnerable so the secuiry put in place to protect it must be updated. Personal details for hotel guests are stored in many different places in a hotel's many systems. This includes the restaurant, gift shops, billing, facilities, and etc. According to the article, hotels needs a "toolbelt" of various security technologies to prevent malicious attacks. The three mentioned in the article are File Integrity Monitoring, Unified Threat Management, and Security Information and Event Management. Please look into the article to read what each of these systems can do in regards to cyber secuity for the hospitality industry. A good way to implement these tools is to look into outsourcing a managing security firm that specializes in cyber security. This can help minimize and even diminish things that can cause breaches in systems. In my opinion, this article gives solutions to hotels in regards to cyber security. Sometimes installing a firewall or antivirus is simply not enough. A security firm that specializes in this area can be considered. It may be expensive depending on the business to do that, however, it will be even more expensive to have a tarnished reputation for not securing customer information and to deal with lawusuits.

In southern Africa the hospitality industry is shifting to become more green with the use of solar power and they aren't only doing this for the image, but because it return on investment is very fast and hotels can power many departments with the rise of new solar technology. Not only do they install solar power panels, they use a new technology that tracks the sun movement so that the panels are shifted so they can gain the most energy possible. According to one hotelier they are able to power their laundry and restaurant at 92% fully with the solar power created. This technology has many advantages as not only will it improve the image, it has a ROI within 5 years and the panels could last 25 years when running on 80% capacity.