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This article is a good overview of POS benefits. Although it is also a sales pitch, I thought it was worth posting it because it serves as a general guide for different business applications. As the concept of smart cash register is becoming the norm, the new trend for modern businesses is point of sale. Regular cash registers simply record sales, give change, and store money. Moreover, they don't even take credit card payments since you need a separate processor for it. Yet, POS systems not only take credit card payments but also cash, can provide detailed sales reports and analytics, marketing tools, customer relationship management, and loyalty programs, just to name a few. It can also tell us the busiest times of day or week, the best-selling items, when stock is running low, and how many are new or returning customers. It can even be used to manage employees' schedule. For bars and restaurants, a POS with menu options that can split the check and accept cash seems like a good choice. For retail stores, the most appropriate POS will provide inventory management and could be connected to a bar code scanner and receipt printer. For contractors, a mobile POS that can be used in offline mode or remote locations would be the best option. Because a POS can be adapted and customized to different business needs, it will soon become business standard.

In any business, a solid marketing strategy is critical to building a brand, attracting new customers and maintaining loyalty. The hospitality industry is no different. Because customer loyalty is key, marketing managers and executives devote a lot of time and resources to building brand awareness and creating ongoing, interconnected campaigns. These marketing efforts usually include both print and digital collateral that target former guests while also attracting new clientele. However, this particular industry has a unique set of challenges that must be overcome. Understanding the importance of marketing in the hospitality industry can help you get ahead and stand out in the competitive job market. Companies in the hospitality industry use various methods to develop and maintain an effective marketing plan. The following are some of the general strategies that marketers use for brand success. Customers choose hotels and other hospitality services for a variety of reasons. From location to facilities and perks, companies have to be sure that they're providing what buyers are looking for. The role of marketers is to identify what factors make customers choose a particular hospitality service, and this requires extensive research. By speaking to current and former guests, monitoring customer reviews on websites, reviewing industry data and more, marketing professionals learn what makes a hospitality service stand out, as well as how it can be improved. If potential customers don't know about a service, they can't purchase it. That's where brand awareness comes in. Marketers make sure information on hotels, resorts and restaurants is easy to find and up-to-date. They can do this by buying ad space on relevant travel sites, creating an engaging website and collaborating with other, noncompeting hospitality services in the same market. Another smart strategy for attracting customers is to run promotions during certain times of the year, usually when business is

The article discusses ransomware attacks on hospitality properties. A 2016 attack left guests locked out of their rooms but the threat could affect different areas of a hospitality business and cause significant disruption to their business. Properties need to be prepared for a security breach with an action plan to prevent cyber-attack. The article points out that it's important to act quickly to segment the network and try to prevent any new devices from being infected. Best practice recommends regular backups and a recovery plan, using anti malware software and being cautious with employee installed software. The most important thing a company can do is to be proactive and prepared for an attack.

Courses in this field teach you about event bidding, finance and accounting, project management and much more. Hospitality, events and tourism students often sit within one department and, understandably, they gain many of the same professional skills. Hospitality students tend to focus more specifically on the running of hotels, restaurants, catering businesses and events. They have lectures on quality control, the latest food and drink, front of house and housekeeping skills. On event management courses, an emphasis is place on the broader picture, for example, how do you plan, promote and run events? And the term events is incredibly diverse, including anything from a small wedding to a big corporate meeting or the American super bowl. Tourism students will learn all about how to manage the movement of people around the planet, and think about what the economic, environmental and social impacts of this movement are. Our national heritage, forests, coastlines and culture are dependent on tourism, and need to be managed by professionals who understand who travels, how they travel and why they travel. When natural and manmade disasters strike, tourism professionals need to know how to respond and how to help companies and destinations recover.

MODULE 7: This article is about the growing trend of quick-service brands implementing mobile and kiosk ordering for their customers. For major quick-service brands like McDonalds, Burger King etc. they've started to implement self-service kiosks or mobile apps allowing their customers to pre-order their meal and pick it up without waiting in a long queue line. At the base of this ever-growing trend, the trend is very similar to when banks started to provide self-servicing ATMs. According to the article in the next three years most of any quick-service brand that has multiple locations on a regional and/or national scale will have implemented a mobile ordering system within their operations. While taking this into consideration, quick-service restaurants need to be careful in how these mobile apps are perceived by people who isn't using it. Some may think that using the mobile app promotes those people to "skip the line", which can cause some negative feedback. With that said, now these quick-service brands need to satisfy their customers who don't use the mobile app so that they don't feel obsolete for not partaking in the trend before. With this growing trend, these quick service brands will not only have to think about their customers walking in their locations but also for the potential customers that are walking on the streets with their mobile devices.

This article makes several points as to how the industry could benefit service from the use of artificial intelligence. By this point we understand that the hospitality industry has an incredible number of guests' data at their disposal and technology today have the capability to completely transform the industry. The travel industry's customer records include guests likes/dislikes, purchases, frequented destinations, and various interests. On top of this, hotels frequently make deals with other tourism-related businesses such as airlines and restaurants, combining even more data to take advantage of. The article continues to list five major ways the hospitality could use AI to improve services: offering the right services to the right customers, enhancing booking engine performance, utilizing an AI-powered concierge, providing in-room chatbots, and utilizing AI to eliminate various service issues. One of the most impact ways this data can be used is in marketing, as knowing what guest is most likely to spend on a particular service/product is invaluable; personalization is key. Booking engines can play a large part in a customer's experience as ease of booking a vacation via combinations of hotel, airline, and rental car service can heftily drive sales. AI is already used in hotels in the form of virtual concierges, essentially an AI that can answer basic questions one may have about a hotel or area. With improvements, this tech can drastically reduce workloads of staff to focus on more personal, service oriented tasks. Voice-activated chatbots are already taking off with Apple's Siri or Amazon's Alexa, imagine these technologies in hotel rooms; being able to utilize this AI could provide guests with a whole new level of service. Lastly, the article closes with how AI can one day create the "ideal customer experience." AI processing/automation can help hospitality businesses to understand the issues of their property better and aim to remedy the issue

In the business world, as well as in many other fields, accounting is used to report (account for) an organization's money and other valuable property. Accounting is utilized by all managers in business and especially by those in the hospitality industry. In fact, in almost every hospitality job, accounting is important. Accounting in the hospitality industry is utilized every time a guest purchases food, beverages, or a hotel guest room. Accounting in business occurs even before a hospitality facility ever opens. This is so because business persons estimate their costs before they decide to build their facilities and often seek loans from banks to help them. Those banks will assuredly want to know about the proposed business's estimated financial performance before they decide to lend it money. Accurate accounting is important to many other individuals in the hospitality industry. The owners of a restaurant or hotel will certainly want to monitor their business's financial condition. These owners may be one or more individuals, partnerships, or small or very large corporations, but they all care about the performance of their investments. Investors in the hospitality industry generally want to put their money in businesses that will conserve or increase their wealth. To monitor whether or not their investments are good ones, investors will always seek out and rely upon accurate financial information. When it is properly done, accounting is simply the process of providing that information.

The organizer, Billy McFarland, 26, was also sentenced for running a sham ticket-selling business - but that fraud was run-of-the-mill compared with the Fyre Festival, which had been promoted by A-list social media influencers but imploded just as publicly on Instagram and Twitter. Mr. McFarland had promised an event with luxury accommodations and performances by bands like Blink-182. But the festival never took place, leaving attendees wandering unfinished sites on the island of Great Exuma in the Bahamas.

In a sentencing memorandum, prosecutors had asked for a prison term of at least 11 years. They called Mr. McFarland "the consummate con artist," adding: "He betrayed and deceived his investors, customers, and employees while he was living the high life at his luxury apartment, traveling to exclusive locales, staying at luxury hotels, being chauffeured in his Maserati, and entertaining himself and his friends at restaurants, bars, and casinos."

Summary: Billy McFarland utilized all of the tools available to hype up an event that had no validity or credibility by solely relying on social media influence to promote a lie.

This article introduces five ways about how small hospitality businesses improve information security. Compared to big hospitality companies, small business owner(SBOs) are not fully aware of the importance of security and in turn, they are vulnerable to damage their brand and potentially sink the business. Especially, small business highly depends on word-of-mouth to advertise their brand. If they face the security issue, they might have no resource to recover when we consider their business size and budget. In order to help SBOs strengthen their information security protocols, first, disposal protocol should be kept when they dump or change the computer. In other words, they should remove and safely destroy the hard drive to ensure information is not recovered. Second, training is necessary. Training is one of the easiest ways to protect confidential data and employees should be knowledgeable of handling the information. Third, organizations must understand the responsibilities for data protection and ensure their protocol comply with new laws. Thus, they should keep up with any changes in legislation. Fourth, paper shredding is necessary. Though we pursue paperless office, still paper is being used, so paper shredding is required to avoid the risk of data breach. Lastly, SBOs should use locked storage consoles to protect sensitive data.

Nowadays, we can say each hotel must have the accounting department. Every successful goal needs a perfect financial management to consolidate it. In the hotel, accounting need to budget preparation, need to do the business planning, creating financial statements and payroll. Hotel needs to pay the salaries for employees and reporting sales and analyzing the profits. This is a huge process. A hotel must manage it efficiently. And owners can make decisions and improve their company. When you report the financial activities, you need to do the real report. A report can give you a chance to take the best decisions and make more profit. As a staff, you need to track cash flows and record transactions. If you have some trouble, you can let the expert help you to solve problems. They can help you to control your cash flows and maximize earnings.

For all businesses, including hospitality businesses, it is essential to have a properly organized accounting system. Every business needs solid financial management to achieve growth without which every business withers and dies. Proper accounting is at the heart of solid financial management. Hospitality accounting includes: preparing a precise collection of month end accounts, a trial balance, budget preparation, business planning, creating financial statements and balance sheets, and payroll. Not only does it enable you to track cash flows and record transactions, but it provides deep insights into the financial status of the business enabling owners to make proactive decisions and improve profits. So to excel in the dynamic hospitality industry seek professional help from expert accounting companies to set up proper accounting to have solid financial management. In my opinion, I believe that to have a successful business you need to have an up to date, accurate way to record your accounting transactions so getting professional help from experts would be wise.

Agilysys Inc., is a "leader" in hospitality software that is known for its guest-oriented innovations that increase revenue for many facets of the hospitality industry such as hotels and cruise lines. Recently they created a solution to POS and PMS that have a very accessible user interface with the ability to use tools to help the ability to capitalize on revenue.These interfaces are widely used in hospitality locations such as resorts and hotels as they have the tools needed to be functional, such as front office operations, guest history, housekeeping, reservations management, with modules for accounting, activities, guest marketing, and many more.

This article talks about important features that a property Management System need to have. The most important features are the following: A drag and drop calendar which will help managers to visualize reservation and availability. Rate plan management will help to create a rate plan and have them easily applied to reservation. Integrated channel manager since it is important for hotels to be able to join as many available channels a possible to make more sales. Reporting is also very important to be able to track performance real time and keep control of the health of the company. Another key important feature is shared inventory and direct booking support since if customers can book directly from the properties website the hotel will avoid paying commissions. The customer data base is great for marketing and to create loyal customers. The last features that a property management system should have are pricing intelligence, point of sale and the ability to track other revenues services from other services that are offered in the property. A PMS system that has all these features will help a company run the property very well. I would add a good customer support because if this system goes down basically the hotel cannot do anything so I think it is very important that if it is not working for any reason that it has be fixed very fast so that it does not affect customer relations.

Swiss Cruise company is starting to use a virtual assistant to answer passengers' questions.

MSC Cruises is rolling out a virtual assistant in passenger cabins called Zoe that will answer spoken questions. It can improve its answers with continual research based on the interactions it has. Zoe was programmed to answer the 800 most common questions - queries about excursions or onboard restaurants, for example - and variations of those questions in seven languages. The questions were gleaned from staff members and from data collected from the ships' guest services desks.

Professor Susskind said that traditional marketing in the travel industry had evolved: "You run the risk of not being able to compete effectively in the marketplace without these enhanced approaches."

Before hotels had the same number of tv channels, but now it's a race to see what hotel can bring more technological advances to the table to increase ROI. Hilton worldwide has adopted an AI-driven concierge in 2016 at a property which is powered by IBM Watson. The article also talks about 5 top emerging hotel technology trends. The first one is Smart guest rooms, the second one is obtaining more data, third is energy conservation. The fourth one is VR and AR which can show people special maps of guest rooms, while the fifth one would be mobile technologies, such as mobile key, room service request.

At a recent even at NYC, the CEO of Hilton, Christopher Nassetta, announced that the Hilton team is developing meeting focused hotels as a means to get the upper hand on event management. These hotels are being built with events such as conventions and business meetings in mind while constructing a five-star property. Thus, a new brand, Signia, was created as a means to improve upon flexibility in its architecture, as well as more daylight, modern design, and more spacious volume, as well as an upgraded culinary experience, and technologies that help run meetings more efficiently, likely updates in their event management system. This premium quality is something that has been constantly asked by them from customers. In the future they are planning to stretch out internationally.

In this article marketing software that hotel's can use to send pre-arrival emails to guests is discussed. This type of contact allows hotels to increase revenue by offering additional services or upgrades as well as create detailed profiles about their guests. These profiles can be used to further segment and advertise as well as just improve the guest experience. 

Although this is not an article per se, I wanted to post this link on here anyways because in recent years I've noticed that more and more places I go to (specifically restaurants and food trucks) I find that they use Square as their POS. After looking through their website I can see why this POS has become so popular. Square is super easy to use, it offers options when it comes to receiving the receipt (as the customer) and you are able to manage your inventory in real time. Additionally, you can create customer profiles, have more than 1 location and create different customer profiles. Basically, this system does everything a traditional POS system does but it is more modern, user friendly and versatile.