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Event technology is forever changing and adapting to current environments. With COVID-19, event technology will be more prevalent than ever. Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality can make the attendee feel like they are in the middle of the event while actually being far away. Facial recognition software allows for streamlining check-in, but also allows for entry to be contactless. As most events have become virtual, livestreaming is very important to bring the event into the living room of those that cannot physically attend. Event apps are becoming more and more popular in that they bring all of the event information right onto an attendee's smartphone and allows them to customize their experience. Attendees can participate from far and wide, so having the information be translated into their language increases their accessibility and inclusion. Artificial intelligence collects user data and turns it into personalized recommendations for their event experience. Games brought into an event increases audience engagement and allows for team building and friendly competition. Event planners have project management software available to them to help streamline their planning and saves them time and money by not having to manually do certain tasks.

Laguna Beach welcomes more than 6 million visitors annually to its sandy shores. Now visitors who stay in the beachside city's 22 hotels and lodging establishments will be inadvertent participants in a citywide effort to recycle all of the soaps, shampoos, hair conditioners, lotions and bath gels that are left over after a night's stay. Starting Monday, Laguna Beach becomes the first city in the nation to have all of its hotel properties with more than 20 rooms participate in Clean the World -- a Florida-based nonprofit that provides recycled hotel soaps and hygiene products to those in need. Montage Laguna Beach, Pacific Edge Hotel and Best Western Laguna Brisas are among the 18 participating hotels, along with four of the city's six bed and breakfasts, for a total of 1,229 rooms. In an average year, with an estimated 75% occupancy rate, Laguna Beach hotels generate 336,000 bars of soap and a slightly lesser number of shampoo, conditioner, bath gel and lotion bottles, all of which were previously thrown in the trash. Working with Clean the World, those hygiene products will be reclaimed by the housekeeping staff and set aside in a separate receptacle to be shipped to a Las Vegas processing facility. The bars of soap are cleaned of hair and paper, sterilized, ground into pellets and pressed into new bars of soap that are distributed to non-governmental organizations in 45 countries that do not have ready access to soap. The bottled amenities are likewise reclaimed. If they're full, the bottles' exteriors are sterilized and redistributed to homeless shelters and soup kitchens inside the U.S. If the bottles are 25% empty, the plastic is recycled or potentially upcycled for use in other products. Founded in 2009, Clean the World has 1,200 partner hotels across the U.S. and Canada, 126 of which are in California, including the Disneyland Hotel, Disney's Grand Californian Resort & Spa and Disney's Paradise Pier Hotel in Anaheim. Since joining the Clean th

Hotel Concepts- Brilliant, a leading global provider of advanced PMS, recently announced its integration of Flip.to into RezExchange. For a small monthly subscription, Flip.to acts as marketing platform for hotels, restaurants, and airports. Customers can use it to comment, post feedback, and recommend the establishment to friends who in turn can get discounts. It also allows loyal guests and customers incentives to spread the word. RezExchange allows customers to manage their sales channels directly from the hotel management system and will receive all reservations from these channels directly into their own database. With this integration customers don't have to present printed coupons and any earned incentives are automatically credited to their hotel profiles. Hotels, restaurants, and airports that already use RezExchange and integrate Flip.to into their system will become more streamlined making it that much easier for customers and guests to build up and use their incentives.   L'Auberge Carmel hotel in California is the first property to go live with this integration and thus far, this integration has proved successful. Approximately 15 to 25 percent of guests who book rooms at participating hotels engage with Flip.to, and for every 100 engaged guests, an average of 10 to 20 additional room nights are booked within six months. 

The article provides information on how Southwest Airlines will finally be participating in the GDS system starting in the year 2020 which is coming up soon. They feel as though this will help their customers modify and customize their reservations and also be able to change, book their own and cancel their reservations at their leisure without needing a Travel Agent. They know they have not been the easiest airline to work with and feel as though this will help and bring in $10-20 million more for them in revenues. I feel as though this is a good move for Southwest Airlines.

In sum, this article discusses the long awaited partnership with Southwest airlines and global distribution channels Amadeus and Travelport. In the past, there have been many debates regarding the topic of "full content" between airlines and travel intermediaries. However, according to Southwest, this agreement will bring "the highest level of participation." As Southwest continues to revamp and improve the way it competes in the global market arena, Tom Nealon, President of Southwest has stated that, "GDSs are the third leg of the stool in Southwest's distribution strategy for business travel. With its great business product, Southwest is hoping to improve the way consumers book, transact and settle by using global distribution systems. With a conservative outlook, Southwest is hoping that the newly formed partnership with Amadeus and Travelport will generate between $10-$20 million in additional revenue in the second half of 2020.

The article demonstrates the benefits of implementing GDS in the hospitality industry. According to the article, installing GDS will enable Southwest Airlines to improve its level of participation by allowing buyers to not only book but also to "change, change, cancel, and modify reservations" via the system. Besides, the implementation of GDS will lead to increase revenue for the company.

This article relates the future shape of Event Management Software that is set to define the future of events management. No longer is it just about just planning seating and defining attendee and rooming lists. Technology has enabled event planners to reach deeper into the behavior, desires and participation needs of attendees defining preferences and engaging rather than just making things happen. Key fundamentals include the capability to reach out to attending audiences, monitor their engagement and illicit responses as well as interact directly or indirectly, through chat bot or polling. While this article focuses on the planner to attendee experience, this holds similar opportunity for Hotel and Event spaces to engage simultaneously and seamlessly through the same platforms. These are incredible and exciting opportunities that 10 years ago were a bucket wish list for event planners and Conference service professionals alike.

Event management software firm Active Network has launched a new suite of mobile applications for meetings and events that is designed to encourage attendees to engage with meetings' goals and conferences' brands, while helping the executives running them to better and more efficiently respond to attendees' needs. While Active Network has explored the possibility for years, it felt that earlier technologies were not good enough - for example, Bluetooth requires a multi-step device pairing before the exchange, and would drain mobile batteries too fast, says Miller.

An Event Management Software firm has launched mobile applications for specific meetings and events to encourage attendees to participate and review certain aspects of the specific event. The company has been in the mobile industry for a few years now and are working their way up the ladder with some pretty large events. The mobile apps the company offers are quite interesting and are a great way to keep the people attending the event involved. In a specific case during a presentation a guest speaker was not fully understood by some people and the attendees were able to review the speaker afterwards saying they didnt totally understand the technology of the app allowed the speaker to come back out and clarify themself. The company is certainly going in the right direction and offers great technological advances to a variety of different fields who host conferences and business events.

This article goes into great detail about how technology is growing within the hotel and tourism industry. The VP of American Express Meeting and Events states that new technologies are providing event planners with much more opportunities to increase participant engagement, obtain feedback and get more connected. The article also dives into the fact that event planners notice that new technology may be a distraction to people who are not accustomed to it. A fun fact I found about this article that event mobile applications can be customized to range up to thousands of dollars to develop and maintain. It seems that meeting applications are working well with larger events as opposed to smaller sized meetings.

This article summarizes the findings taken from research done within the Expedia Group's global hotelier panel consisting of 1,215 hotelier participants that used a choice-based study to compare technology investments between defined hotel chains and small independent hotels. In summary, chain hotels were likely to invest twice as much in technology when compared to small independent hotels. Conversely, small independent hotels were likely to invest more in rooms reservations than chain hotels. The I.T investment strategy varied among the two hotel segments. Small independent hotels choose technology based on affordability, value, and complexity of technology, whereas chain hotels bought technology based on its ability to integrate into their existing systems, the price was not mentioned.

My opinion on this article surrounds my personal experience in the way I have been able to experience third party extranet portals and because of these enhancements that Expedia has developed for hotel partners, I have seen a tremendous amount of return on investment that goes into technology development. Many consumers have been influenced by these third party sites because they offer a type of experience that is different from traditional booking methods and often times consumers are able to snag cheaper rates than they would with booking hotel direct. I would like to see how this trend goes on in future years because I have seen more third party bookings in recent months and it should follow that trend for years to come.

The article focuses on applying technology in the hospitality industry, based on the study conducted by Expedia Group (Big Think). The article summarized the research study conducted on 1215 hoteliers worldwide, assessing the focus and prioritization of technology investments by these businesses. The study provides that Chain of hotels are twice as likely to invest in technology than SME in the hospitality industries, with these SMEs being 1.5 times more likely to invest in renovations. In the year 2019, approximately 54% of hotels focused on increasing their technology investments, with only 8% focusing on reducing the same. This provided that more hoteliers were willing to "stay ahead of the curve" than those that focused on adopting the "wait and see" approach. In this respect, hoteliers identified that their main technology investments were influenced by the value and affordability of the same and the capacity to integrate them with existing technologies. On the other hand, the main challenges associated with the technologies were complexity, affecting 25% of the respondents, and ease of use, affecting 33.33% of the respondents (Big Think). In focusing on technological advancement, the Expedia Group focused on technological elements such as Partner Central Mobile Application improvements, new "rooms and rate," page improvements, new "marketing" improved pages, new homepages adaptive, as well as multiple-property portfolio dashboards. With regard to the market perspective, digital marketing/website optimization, smart room, reputation management, revenue management, guest check-ins, and payment solutions were the main technological focuses for the hoteliers. Focusing on the reasons hoteliers were motivated to invest in technology, the study established that improving productivity, improving loyalty and repeat visits, improving guest experiences and reviews, reducing costs, and improving revenue generation topped the list.  

Planning and executing meetings just got more high-tech. Meeting architecture is a software program that takes planning a meeting to a whole new level. It allows for the users to have an "experience" and not just a regular meeting. It is all-encompassing in that it involves the participants and their needs, as well as the desired outcomes, when in the planning stage. For instance, it will need to know how heavy the planners would like the audience to participate and the type of format to use. It will use all of this information to "construct" an actual plan for the meeting with all of the logistics needed.

According to the article, two Romanian nationals have plead guilty for participating in an international, multimillion-dollar scheme to remotely hack into and steal payment card data from hundreds of U.S. merchants' computers, including a great number of Subway restaurants. The reality is that anyone with an Internet connection can search for, identify and target remote applications that businesses rely on. This case is a warning to operators utilizing POS systems to shore up their security by taking steps to make their accounts more difficult to breach and therefore less attractive hackers.

This article discusses the security issues with restaurants using remote desktop applications that are easily accessed by hackers trying to steal stored credit card information. The relative simplicity in which these hackers were able to steal the numbers should pose a real concern for restaurant owners in making sure their systems are properly secure from theft. They were able to crack simple password protected applications to gain access to private information. These remote applications used by restaurants are a not provided with enough security and therefore are easy targets for hackers.

Some differences exist between organisations that run events for profit motives and those that are not-for-profit oriented. Government grants are seldom achievable by for-profit enterprises. Small scale events run by not-for-profit organisations are likely to be funded by participant fees. Larger scale events, whether run by for-profit or not-for-profit enterprises will likely need substantial support through commercial sponsorship. In many cases, fees paid by people who spectate can be a worthwhile source of income.

The article show us that when planning a convention, meeting planners consider how to incorporate a range of emerging new technologies for the program. MPI used a fog screen. The imagined possibilities for fogscreen technology, an emerging new technology, include the projection of corporate logos, messages and other images. Event and meeting planners should know about future technologies and how/when to use them in various programs. As part of the MPI WEC 2008 opening reception sponsored by Meetings by Harrah's at Caesar's Palace, Las Vegas, attendees walked through a fogscreen of the MPI logo as they entered the opening cocktail reception. Caesar's Palace's objective was to showcase how they can change the environment of a static room, explained Reina Herschdorfer, executive director of catering/conventions and events for Caesar's Palace. Fogscreen technology is an emerging technology that is dry, so attendees and guest will not walk through the fog and get wet.

The FogScreen is an extraordinary display option that offers a seamless projection area made, as the name suggests, of dry fog. Using ordinary water, a flat thin layer of mist is created, onto which you can make high-quality projections - that you can walk through. The fog feels cool and dry to touch and, by varying the density of the fog, different effects can be created to suit the venue and your purpose.  The screen is created by using a suspended fog generating device with no frame around, and works with video projectors. The fog they use is dry, so it doesn't make you wet even if you stay under the Fog Screen device for a long time.  The fog is made of ordinary water with no chemicals what so ever. With two projectors, you can project different images on both sides of the screen. It is a display device which is the application of computer graphics. With Fogscreen, planners are able to make better visual effect and encourage more participation and engagement of attendees. However, Fogscreen hasn't been widely used in terms of high prices. 

HFTP, stands for Hospitality Financial and Technology Professionals, the global association wants to create hospitality financial and technology supports to stakeholders and help to compile accounts, compare regional differences and define the value of daily operations. Also HFTP is working with lots of organization includes associations universities and volunteers to collect information to participate and assist the sponsor.

Technology absolutely plays important role to facilitate meetings and conference running smoothly. The Audience-response systems (ARS) ease the communication between attendees and speaker, which encourages the engagement from participants. As one big goal of meeting and convention is to bring people together and let them know each other, technology like ARS is essential for a successful meeting. According to most planners' experience, it's really annoying to pass around the microphone when somebody wants to ask question. The new microphone function is also added into ARS so that attendees can ask question without waiting for passing the microphone. In addition, ARS can track attendance for crediting purpose. As long as WiFi is available, surveys can be sent by laptops, iPads and iPod touches.

This article discusses the security issues with room keys. These hotel locks will not open with cards that are read as duplicates or duplicatable. The locking mechanism has been specifically designed to alert the front desk and secuirty departments in the event these locks are tampered with. I'm sure at one point or another we have all experimented with our room key and tried to open other doors. A system like this will prevent activity like that.

This article talk about the issue that hotel are having with their security system lock for guest room. These cards are easy to duplicate. The new system will alert front desk or security if the lock has been tampered with. Other alarms include detecting that a door is forced open 'mule tool' instruction when a door is open from the inside handle without an occupant in the room.

This article discusses the current state of hotel lock safety. Monitoring safety has changed as these locks become more automated. The article states that, "Hotel Management corresponded with Tim Shea, president of ASSA ABLOY Hospitality, for ways in which vendors are keeping hotel locks secure." Through VingCard Elsafe's locks, hotel security and safety has increased. VingCard says, "Our Classic magstripe locks do not store critical security information within individual locks, such as master key information, and any service device must authenticate itself through diversified encryption methods to gain access to the lock software." This is just one of the ways the locks increase security. The article also states that the system is cost-effective for hoteliers.

The Swissotel Chicago hotel was renovated this spring with a total investment of $10 million. The hotel decided to invest in new technology to attract more business and improve the overall performance of the hotel. "Updates to the lobby include a new earth-tone color palette and check-in pods in place of a central front desk. All front-desk agents are now equipped with laptops that allow them to roam and check guests in even when they're not stationed at the pods." This new renovated hotel offers a soundtrack of DJ beats, televisions, and multimedia plug-ins. The meeting space also provides the best in technology. "The hotel is the first Chicago property to offer Nervana's Bonfire Events Management app for meeting planners and attendees." This allow event planners to work more efficiently with schedules, flights, meetings and presentations "connects meeting participants through a social media site, and sends alerts for any schedule changes."

The article talks about how the most important gastronomic event in Brazil "The Pernambuco Restaurant Week" was promoted to attract a large population. This festival started 20 years ago in New York and nowadays it takes place in 100 cities around the world. By marketing the festival through different media channels and promoting it through e-marketing the participating restaurants are expecting exposure, brand recognition and an increase of business "The festival is aimed at warming the sales of the restaurants that, in turn, undertake to transfer part of the profit to a social institution. This year the organization was chosen as the Child Citizen Orchestra Boys of coke, which serves 130 youths, between 4 and 19 years." The main sponsor of this famous event was MasterCard giving the brand popularity, position, and exposure in the Brazilian market.

Thank you for sharing this. I love Brazilian food. I will have to see if there is any restaurants in the area that are participating.