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Choice created the software in 2003 as an inexpensive solution for franchisees of its economy brands.

The PMS had a lot of growing pains at first, but eventually it became more and more cloud enabled and was adopted across the company.

“A lot of companies had outsourced their IT and now they’re bringing it back in house because they can do almost everything they need on the cloud or through software as a service.

Events in the hospitality industry include weddings, business meetings, celebration dinners and fundraisers.

The events and meetings industry generated $263 billion in direct spending in 2009, according to a study by the Convention Industry Council.

As the owner of a small business in the hospitality industry, your first priority is the satisfaction of the client, the person who booked the event and is paying for it.

As the owner of a small business in the hospitality industry, your first priority is the satisfaction of the client, the person who booked the event and is paying for it.

Their experience depends on the quality of the food, friendliness of the staff and the ambiance of the room

However, a successful event leaves the client feeling that he got more than he paid for.

As travelers increasingly turn to the Internet and mobile devices to research and book travel, successful online marketing in hospitality has become increasingly critical to the industry’s success. Adept keyword selection, website designs, and social media campaigns can turn general online travel bookers into loyal repeat customers that book directly on hotel websites.

Profitable online strategies can be difficult to come by in hospitality, a dynamic industry where opportunities abound and many complex factors affect success. The cost of keywords has increased, yet many hotel budgets have reached a plateau.

hoteliers must compete with mammoth online travel agencies possessing multi-million-dollar budgets.

The Keys to Marriott's Success Long before the economy went south, Marriott had a reputation for finding creative ways to wrest the most value from every IT dollar.

The devil is in the details—success is in the system.-The Spirit to Serve Metrics drive Marriott. Talk to an IT associate on any given day, and he can tell you exactly how much business the company processed via its systems that week per second ($3,568 when this reporter visited).When implementing the PeopleSoft enterprise service automation module for project tracking and time reporting within IT, for example, programmers developed a tool so that project and productivity metrics are automatically computed after time is entered. Another rule for metrics is to make sure that the right people get the right data in a form that’s meaningful to them. "You need to measure a lot of things, but the trick is to publish the right information to the relevant audience," says Melnick. "Having Marriott.com up and running is not as important as the dollars running through it," explains Keppler. Melnick adds, "For each system we try to focus on the core metrics. And that changes. What might have been important the day you go live becomes a nonevent a few weeks in." For example, five years ago the critical metric for Marriott.com was uptime. Today, it’s how much business the website books. Last year, metrics fueled the IT department’s decision to invest in an upgrade to the site that would make it easier to reserve rooms. Today, more than 75 percent of rooms booked online come through Marriott.com, saving the company $12 million annually.Keeping its eye on the numbers lets Marriott revisit business cases for IT projects each quarter. "The project itself may not change that much, but something external may happen—something like SARS, something from the competition," Melnick explains. "Just because you start a project and it’s on track doesn’t mean you want to keep the same pace. There may be something that comes up that’s even better." Success is never final.-The Spirit to Serve Though the IT department’s resourcefulness is helping keep Marriott afloat during hard times, Wilson and his peers aren’t taking anything for granted. They say they can’t let their culture of resourcefulness wither away when the economy turns around. They’re reminded of how easy it could be to let their guard down each time they flip through Mr. Marriott’s book in which he quotes Somerset Maugham: "The unfortunate thing about this world is that good habits are so much easier to give up than bad ones."But Wilson believes the principles and procedures put in place for prudent and resourceful IT decision making should keep the company on the straight and narrow and ahead of the competition."I have a firm belief that the only real sustainable competitive advantage we can get with IT is making sure our people understand conceptually what IT can and can’t do and apply it better than competitors," Wilson says. "Anything we do in IT, a competitor can install. What they can’t capture that quickly is having a team of people throughout the company that really gets this and follows it all the way through. That’s sustainable."Marriott has valued resourcefulness—on paper if not always in practice—for decades. But resourcefulness is not an end in itself. It’s a tool one uses in the ongoing construction of value, a project that’s never finished. Or, as Mr. Marriott says succinctly in his book, "Success is never final."

Ask any hotelier and they will all agree that a hotel management system plays a key role in their hotel’s success.

At the back-end, hotel software is even more important. The front office module, point of sale, accounts receivable, banquets and conferences, restaurant module, housekeeping, inventory, HR and Payroll, along with a host of other modules and apps in a hotel software must work in an interconnected and smooth manner.

former World Bank executive

trustee of the James Beard Foundation and co-founded the JBF Women’s Leadership and the Women’s Entrepreneurship Leadership programs

The culinary “gastro ceiling” is especially appalling with less than 7% leading women executive chefs

3 October 2012 Benchmark Powers Expansion with Centralized Accounting Platform Management by the Numbers: Benchmark Integrates New Properties into Company Management Processes Quickly with ‘Private-Cloud’ Back Office System

Successful management comes from by-the-numbers decisions

Basing day-to-day management decisions on the numbers is another big part of successful management in today's economy. At one time, we had to wait until month end or later to see property financials. We do not have that luxury today, so we built a centralized 'private cloud' technology hub and data gathering platform. Now our managers make decisions based on month-to-date performance every morning.

nformation risk management solutions and services provider Paladion has raised $10 million (just over Rs 60 crore) in fresh funding from Nadathur Holdings, an investment firm of Infosys co-founder NS Raghavan, and an early backer of the company.

he information security market is entering an exciting phase and we aim to bring a host of new offerings and value to the market,” said Rajat Mohanty, CEO, Paladion.

Paladion provides a spectrum of information risk management solutions

Once this is understood, next step is to make a program or customization accordingly through the software. Software cannot work without hardware. A good Information Technology System comprise of three components, Systems, Software and Hardware.

It is not uncommon that one may have good computer system yet may not be successfully getting right information for the business.

From the time of reservation until the time customer checks-out of the hotel everything is recorded and the data is available. The computer system really monitors the guest requirement, their likes and dislikes, their wants and satisfaction levels in a readable way that helps the hotel enhance their future services.

Human resources (HR) have been a well-established function in organizations for decades,

the department was typically perceived by many organizations as a “necessary evil,” that is to say, as an essential but in no way profitable or advantageous element,

even at the current time HRIS is not limited to technological elements alone, such as computer hardware and software applications, but also includes the people, policies, procedures, and data required to manage the HR function.

Taking a partnership approach is often the most effective way to find a successful lasting solution to a problem that achieves ‘buy-in’ from all parties

A key partnership mechanism is the Global Compact, an international multi-stakeholder initiative which brings companies together with UN agencies, governments, labour and civil society to support universal environmental and social principles.

With specific regard to tourism, as far back as 1999, the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development (UN-CSD) identified that sustainable tourism development ‘cannot be successful without a profound collaboration with all stakeholders’] It stressed the importance of involving small and large-scale tourism operators in solving problems;

Last year, #MURTEC introduced MURTALKs, concise 20-minute presentations that deliver big insights. On March 8, 2017, Stephanie Nardini, senior director of IT, Jersey Mike’s Franchise Systems, will deliver one such MURTALK as she describes the agony, ecstasy, risks and rewards of going all-in with a large-scale technology project in her presentation titled: "Thinking Big with IT: Implementing Large-Scale Projects."

She will illustrate how to take a company-wide initiative from inception to successful implementation, all while navigating proprietary technology, vendor partners and multiple stakeholders.

Now in its 22nd year, the Multi-Unit Restaurant Technology Conference (MURTEC) produced by Hospitality Technology, has become the “Gold Standard” event for education and networking in the restaurant technology industry.

“Advances in wireless and mobile technologies, products and services are changing the landscape of the hospitality industry and how it operates,” says Craig Mathias, principal, Farpoint Group. “With a demanding client base equipped with increasing numbers of smartphones, tablet computers, notebook PCs and even rugged devices, successful hospitality IT organizations recognize the need to upgrade their existing WLANs to improve network reliability, capacity and coverage to support customer-facing applications, as well as internal services that enable their own mobile workforce and improve the guest experience.”

The platform’s flexibility and diverse offerings have proven successful across a broad base of customers from craft breweries to cideries, distilleries to wineries, brewpubs to non-brewery taprooms, and beyond

Now that taprooms and tasting rooms are driving so much revenue for craft breweries, picking the right POS can make a big difference in both customer and employee experience.

The platform’s flexibility and diverse offerings have proven successful across a broad base of customers from craft breweries to cideries, distilleries to wineries, brewpubs to non-brewery taprooms, and beyond

The right property management system (PMS) is a key factor in hotel success. Having a system that makes frontdesk workflows easy, will create a seamless guest experience. With the abundance of new technology in the property management systems industry, there is no time like the present to upgrade your PMS.

Having streamlined and easy check in and checkout processes is important for both the guest experience and hotel efficiency. A property management system will help you perform these tasks with ease, increasing productivity and delivering that exceptional guest experience.

A PMS that connects to a channel manager means all your availability is constantly being updated. This means no double bookings, saving you and your team time by eliminating double bookings.