Group items tagged

This article goes into detail on how information technology has grown to a critical level for the success of business operations. Tourism has grown in India to become the largest service industry for the country, providing 6.23% to the national GDP, and providing 8.78% of the total employment. It is estimate that over 5 million annual foreign tourists arrive alongside 562 million domestic tourists. The implementation of this information technology provides a multitude of benefits including reducing costs, enhancing operation efficiency, and improving service quality and customer experience. To list some of these components; The railway, car rental, and bus/coach systems are all computerized and information regarding tourist/passenger transit data is now readily available. Airlines have fully implemented CRS (Computer Reservation System) to help generate higher rates of occupancy and boarding the scope of the market. Though these systems have helped improve the India's economic growth, the current structure of the tourism industry has shown that businesses in the accommodation sector lacked direct access to travelers and consumers. It's thanks to e-business that suppliers have found technological solutions (GDS's) to direct traffic properly. The Ministry of Tourism's Plan channels over half of their budget to the development of destinations, circuits, mega projects as well as rural tourism infrastructure projects. The travel and tourism industry has revolutionized the travel plans and strategies for India, and it's thanks to the embracing of newly developed and effective information technology that has turned operations to running on a new level of efficiency.

This article is about the future of global distribution systems and how airlines are making a push towards direct bookings. They are using things like performance adverting, metasearch networks, and data based e-commerce in increase revenue and improve operations.

Restaurants are one of the most tedious and stressful businesses. Being diligent and focusing on attention to detail is very important. But with this comes being time oriented and managing every task at the upmost level. Sometimes, being a manager in the restaurant industry, you are pulled in many directions that human error is entered into many ways for money to be lost. Using POS systems assists in keeping track of any items not just ticketing systems from front of the house to the kitchen. Inventory can be kept track of with POS systems, to labor forecasting, to purchasing, etc. These functions assist taking a big part of human error out of the aspect to allow for more accurate documentation of revenue. This is also now freeing up time so the manager can focus on other items to assist in driving revenue.

This is an awesome article describing the growth of technology in marketing strategies. It lists some of the many ways that eMarketing is evolving, and how these changes are affecting the hospitality industry.

Wow that was a good article! Thank you for sharing!

This article highlights the topic of Data Mining and the way in which companies use it to become informed and discover new ways to become more effective. Data Mining can be used to increase revenue, cut costs and identify growing trends. This article will feature key examples from major companies such as Oracle, Wal-Mart and the NBA, all of which use Data Mining to enhance their business performance. 

This article predicts the future of networking and the internet, which is a challenging thing to do, considering how complex this technology is. Among some things predicted are that web site address space will eventually run out and the domain names will crash as human recognition will be able to navigate through web pages. The most interesting thing I found is that broadband routers will soon disappear due to multiple internet capable devices will be able to solely communicate with each other, meaning our phones, watches, and computers will all be connected without a router. It also goes deeper into the possibility of a future without an internet network. It's hard to predict that we will also be able to fight against cyber attacks and spam and keep our internet at use. Imagine a future with no internet! What will be the next big thing then?

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.

This article talks about the future of event planning. The efforts hotels will have to make to be competitive in the industry. It also talks about the technology that will have to be offered such as VR (virtual reality).

This article is very interesting because it lists all the ways that event planning will be in the future because of technological advances. It talks about autonomous staff, 3D shopping, made-to-order venues, personalized longevity health spas, pop-up hotels, supersonic air travel, sustainable hotels, personal travel avatars, and DNA authorization. The article describes the benefits and downfalls to each one and puts emphasis on the fact that these advances are closer than we can imagine.

This article was very interesting because it provided us with 5 different strategies to effectively use e-marketing for hotels. The five strategies they come up with are: Optimize your website for search engines, Strengthen your local SEO, Encourage interaction on social media, Educate guests with content marketing, and Dominate your competitors with PPC. All of these are very helpful hints that we might have heard of before, but it is crucial to go more in depth. I found very interesting that all of them are free except for the last one that requires a bit of an investment.

This article is talking about wireless internet becomes more and more important in the hotel industry. They provide some of the key considerations for the hoteliers that help the hotel to ensure they can meet the demands of their customers. There's a big demand for wireless access to hotels. Every customer would like to choose a hotel with a Wi-Fi service. Wireless become very necessary in the hospitality industry. The best wireless service that can help the hotel create the loyalty customers. Wi-Fi has become a standard amenity, therefore, the hotel has to find affordable and non-disruptive solutions to meet customers wants and needs. Currently, customers would like to use the smart phone and their computer to watch videos rather than watch TV. They are not just sending email and web surfing anymore. There have a strong needs of the best internet from the hotels. The articles showed us couple challenge of wireless in the hotel. First of all, weak cellular signal strength. In many hotels, for guests, it's not always can find the signal of their cell phone, especially in urban area. The customers can't have a good voice communication with others. Maybe because the location of that room in the corner and there have something will disturb the signals or building construction that will interrupt the signal as well. The solution of the cellular signal strength is "Make provision for both voice and data signals to be amplified." To installing that equipment that always needs the hotel to run a new cable in order to provide the good signals for the guest used. The second challenge for the hotels is "Cellular Network Capacity Issue". Since cellular companies continue selling the device for many years without expanding their network to meet their demand. For example, AT&T is the first company that realized this issues when there are sell iPhone and another cellular. Thus, it's very important that each device support connection to the internet by use Wi-Fi withou

Network redundancy is the process of enhancing network devices and lines of communication to help safeguard network availability and decrease the risk of failure along the critical data path. Redundancy in networks purpose is to help eliminate specific areas of failure to guarantee better network stability and availability when the network would otherwise be offline. Optimize network redundancy by backing up data offsite and conductions frequent test to measure its durability and maintain it. Protect the network from malicious attacks is also important. By creating plans for when attacks occur by rerouting network services.

This gift hunt utilized a mobile shopping assistant app, Nate, to engage customers with various brands. Using location based marketing through QR codes, players found brands and then received information or promotions about the brand.

This article gives examples of the various types of cloud computing and their advantages and disadvantages. It shows that there are cloud-based options that can be appropriate for every business.

The article focuses on how artificial intelligence will shape the casino and hotel industry in Las Vegas and beyond. AI currently used at all but one Caesars Entertainment Inc. properties in Las Vegas is called IVY. This virtual concierge is able to answer a multitude of questions that front desk would be called for which reduces call volume and lines at the front desk. On the casino floor Konami and Scientific games have AI technology with facial recognition for slot machines that provide personalized service, user login, and gambling recommendations. The article also discusses how crowd tracking technology and in security helps with the floor layout and what guests are on the floor. As stated many of the security features may be in place now.

Consumers change phones often which in turn changes their MAC addresses. Retailers then lose all the the consumers behavior. Most consumers also rarely download retail applications.Although proximity marketing has had its limitations, it has continued to evolve which means that it will be present in the future.

In the wake of the Marriott International cyberattack, the article presents the issues with the current issues in the methodology of cybersecurity; first explaining the data of how popular they are in the hospitality industry, and what it means for the industry, before going into the process of how a cyberattack happens and the measures taken to prevent it. Traditional cybersecurity is one of an "incident response" which can only be implemented once a cyberattack occurs and can only prevent it temporarily as a hacker can do similar tasks with different IP addresses and new malware. In order to circumvent this failure of cybersecurity, the article offers a new method in which TTPs (tactics, techniques, and procedures), are used to identify certain components of a hacker and identify how they would carry out an attack, before acting on it before the attack would "reach the network".

This article discusses one of the largest fears of most hospitality firms, and that is keeping their client's personal information private. Most large companies in this industry have become giant data centers for the personal information of millions of people. Breaches of this type of information place the lives of many people at stake. For example, Marriott International had a security breach of over half a billion of its clients which began in 2014 and was not detected until September of this year. Keeping an individual's information away from malignant forces is just plain business sense and any more attacks of this manner will severely hurt the reputation of the business experiencing it.

In this article the author shares how five trends in technology can improve guest experiences two-fold. One being the ease and convenience offered by technology software that range from easy check-ins, app loyalty programs, augmented reality, adaptive artificial intelligence in chat box just to name a few. Secondly, by having these technologies made available will increase interaction time between guest and staff, hence offering phenomenal guest experiences that can't be matched. Moreover, the author stresses while these trends would be great to implement, it is as equally important to ensure that the hardware such as the network are able to support them otherwise the hotel's efforts to improve services through technology would be futile.

Memorial Day weekend will soon be upon everyone and with summer officially kicks off. This article talks about how hotels can clean up and do better to protect their guest personal information. A few years ago, all major corporation were required to adopt General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) regulations which helped some hospitality companies. In my current capacity with Marriott International as a Workforce Administrator we were required to schedule all customer facing associates for training on GDPR. Prior to Marriott acquiring Starwood hotel company they had their own data hacking which caused an increased expense for Marriott to let customer know they were doing all they can to stop the data breach and protect their personal information. They also created a dedicated call center for this effort to let guest know that they will continue to put protecting their personal information as a high priority. This article outlines how hotels can prepare for increased guest traffic and protect their guest personal identical information. One of my responsibilities as a Workforce admin is to handle staffing for all of Marriott International Customer Engagement Centers. Employee training on GDPR is required every year for Marriott associates. Training employees on how to better protect guest personal information is more cost effective than dealing with a data breach due to negligence of an absent-minded employee. Guest expect to know their personal information is going to be protected. This allows them to have piece of mind. Leaving a clear and clean area allows for guest to feel that their information is being protected. Imagine walking up to the front desk and finding the previous guest personal information cluttered in view. This will make the current feel their personal information will left unattended and viewable to the guest to walk up causing nothing but anxiety attacks. Unable to enjoy their summer vacation. Guest expect that the overall security of the hotel

Another point as for the "clean desk" policy goes, it also needs to include stricter policies on securing credit card information. It should not be written down or repeated on the telephone. In an open environment sound can carry and unwanted parties can hear. Cell phones should be stored away from the desk, because cell phones are in itself a potential security breach.

Our hotel as well has reinforced the clean desk policy. I remembered the data breach for Marriott it was in most major news channel and at work for several months we had the same questions from our guest requesting more information. As you stated a hotline was created and of of course the most surprising for me was the acceptance from our guest. Main responses were, with the new technology advance world we've coming and going into that is something we all have to face.

The Future of hotel industry on 2020 reflecting the growth of peer to peer such as AirBNB, Hotels need to use all this data to be hand of the game or keeping up other industries. 

This article discusses five ways to stimulate Ecommerce which includes corresponding with guests, remaining active on social media, not letting your SEO go on leave, devising media budgets and targeting, as well as employing the help of an expert. The author emphasized staying in contact with your customers whether it be through your website, social media, or email. The intention is to stay connected with your guest so that when it is time for them to choose a hotel, they will choose yours. Social media can be used as a tool to entice your future guest and keep them interested in your property. Keeping search traffic up for your website will also ensure people continue to look at your property. Keep in mind the kind of travelers that will come to your property, and tailor your advertisements, messaging, and offers to meet the needs of those travelers. And lastly, if needed, do not be afraid to enlist the help of an expert. This article is meant as a guide for getting one's Ecommerce back on track during these hard pandemic times.

My opinion on this article is that E-commerce has been a huge hit as of lately and it is time for this type of trend to follow in the hospitality world. There is a huge shift from walk-in business to online bookings and the best way to show guests the improvements to the property would be through email and social media presence. This would give properties a competitive advantage when it comes to OTA bookings.