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Credit card fraud and identity theft should remain high on the hotel and lodging industry’s radar. Just ask Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide (including their Westin, Sheraton and W Hotel brands), Hilton, Hyatt and the Trump Hotel Collection, all of which were victims of highly publicized, major breaches in the hospitality industry last year. 

Hotels need a ‘toolbelt’ of various security technologies that can be used to prevent malicious attacks. A managed firewall is essential, blocking dangerous traffic from coming onto the network and preventing sensitive data from being exfiltrated, or sent, to the hackers.

In the breaches mentioned above, point-of-sale (POS) systems were attacked and malware launched to acquire cardholder names, credit card numbers and expiration dates.

How well Internet Explorer--or any Web browser, for that matter--protects against attacks and malware greatly depends on whether you keep it up to date and have the right security settings. Here's how to take the proper security measures with Internet Explorer 9 and 10.

IE lets you set custom security settings for different zones: Internet, Local Intranet, Trusted Sites, and Restricted Sites. When you visit a website, IE automatically classifies it as in the Internet zone. The exceptions are websites hosted by your local network (say, a site set up for use on your company's network)--then it's Local Intranet--or sites that you've added to the Trusted or Restricted lists beforehand. You can set each zone to a predefined security level and customize the settings as well.

The trick to selecting a hospitality call accounting system is to know how to eliminate unsuitable options quickly by asking the right questions.

The trick to selecting a hospitality call accounting system is to know how to eliminate unsuitable options quickly by asking the right questions. There's no shortage of supply just suitable solutions. Different properties have different requirements and we have yet to find a solution that fits every type of property from a hotel chain through to a single location motel. The best way to choose between the dozens of call accounting systems is to have a checklist identifying requirements in descending order from mandatory through to "nice to have." If a short-listed candidate doesn't satisfy a critical requirement waste no more time, move onto the next and repeat the cycle. The objective is to identify one or more call accounting systems that satisfy all mandatory requirements. It's only at that stage that cost should be considered. Cost is irrelevant if a "solution" can't do the job. If you're lucky enough to find two or more options that are fully compliant then cost becomes the final consideration.

Roughly a quarter of the global population will reportedly shop online this year. That’s an increase of 40 percent since 2014, with more growth to come.

Know how your audience uses smartphones.

Email marketing remains critical for ecommerce, but Messenger, text, and app notifications are becoming more commonplace for shipping and delivery confirmations.

As HR teams navigate the new remote work environment caused by COVID-19, an organization's human resource information system has become a critical tool for keeping employees connected

Managers are on the front lines of employee relations, so they are critical in facilitating business responses to COVID-19

Here are four ways HR can employ an HRIS during the COVID-19 pandemic.

With 24% of online hotel bookings coming from mobile phones and 55% to 66% of those bookings being made by tablets, mobile apps for the Hotel Property Management System (HPMS) market are becoming integral to the success of the business, according to Info-Tech Research Group. An HPMS Vendor Landscape report, published by Info-Tech Research Group, ranked Infor and MICROS as Champions in a market that is learning new tricks.

"Making reservations through mobile devices, specifically tablets, is becoming more and more critical in appealing to customer booking preferences

Good news for the security of hotels and travelers: Onity, whose keycard locks can be found on at least four million rooms around the world, has a plan to fix a security flaw

Black Hat security conference by Cody Brocious, a Mozilla developer who showed that he was able to insert a device he built for less than $50 into the data port on the underside of Onity’s locks, read their memory to find a decryption key, and use it to gain access to the lock’s firmware and trigger its open command in a matter of seconds.

The company’s response to that epic security bug has two parts–a quick fix, and a more rigorous one, both of which it plans to make available by the end of August: First, it’s issuing caps that cover the data port Brocious’s hack exploited, which can only be removed by opening the lock’s case.

The next time you stay in a hotel room, run your fingers under the keycard lock outside your door. If you find a DC power port there, take note: With a few hacker tricks and a handful of cheap hardware, that tiny round hole might offer access to your room just as completely as your keycard

Using an open-source hardware gadget Brocious built for less than $50, he can insert a plug into that DC port and sometimes, albeit unreliably, open the lock in a matter of seconds. “I plug it in, power it up, and the lock opens,”

The ability to access the devices’ memory is just one of the two vulnerabilities Brocious says he found in Onity’s locks

s a particularly complicated dilemma for hotel groups, which must answer not only to guests but to owners, members and franchisees. One black sheep in the family can tarnish the reputation of other properties and the brand as a whole.

Social media changes the rules of marketing.

Travelers don’t expect perfection, but they do expect transparency and authenticity.

ou can see other customers in the restaurant as they experience the restaurant in their own way – some mesmerized by the robots, others focused on their food and seemingly oblivious to the fact that the robots are even there.  Its an awesome scene.

The robots are fully autonomous, taking a customer order and cooking it from start to finish.  This includes boiling the noodles, pouring broth, adding spices and toppings, and so on.  The orders are complex too, requiring the robots to take customer preference for amount and type of sauce, salt, noodle, and so on.   The finished product is handed off to a human server who brings the food to the customer’s table.  The irony could not be more real as we witness the lowly human in the role of a mere server while the robot takes on the cooking.

The restaurant, called FA-men (pronounced Fu-a-men) based in Nagoya, Japan, takes its name from the phrase “Fully Automated raMEN” says Ni-Lab.  Not content to simply sit around when there are no orders to cook, the robots can be seen doing tricks and even performing pretend combat with a sword (knife) and a shield (plate) in homage to Manzai, a  style of stand-up comedy in Japan.  If you know Japanese, or are just curious, you can check out FA-men’s website.

“boys club.”

emerging market dedicated to organic ingredients and sustainable practices.

With such clean ingredients, the end product isn’t as stable as it’s more traditional counterparts, and therefore needs to be sold relatively soon after production.

With 57% of all hotel bookings made online and 97% of all travelers searching for a place to stay using the Internet, the importance for hotels to adapt best ecommerce practices is more important today more than ever.

1. Use High Res Photos

No guest in his or her right mind would book a hotel without seeing photos of the property first. Beautiful photos is a deal breaker when it comes to almost all hotel bookings. Make sure that you use high res photos on your hotel website and make sure that you upload new ones regularly.

The real trick to achieving green IT is to accept the fact that your current IT assets are fixed. You’re not going to lose a lot of physical servers. What you can do, however, is get a better idea of your current servers’ utilization and a feel for which servers are more efficient. Identify which of your servers produce more workload for less energy. By identifying the most efficient machines and those with extra capacity, you can start to slowly consolidate tasks—using virtualization, in most cases—and perhaps reduce energy costs a bit.

Typically, green IT simply means building an IT infrastructure that uses fewer resources—most notably energy.

Many companies profess a concern for the environment, but few are remodeling their data centers or taking major steps toward greener technology.

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."

So, what’s the issue? For one, the whopping commissions the massive web-based entities take, routinely in the 20- to 30-per-cent range

Hotels won’t give them any parameters at all, he points out, and a different pricing model will have to emerge. “They won’t necessarily take commission or such, but they might charge you just to drive people to your site. It’s a scary idea.

The net result, says Estis Green, whose company conducts hotel data analytics, is that hotels can’t really compete on price alone anymore. It’s why, in today’s new reality, competition is a game played with other factors, including value-added services, rates based on multiple nights’ occupancy or other inspired — even desperate — offers devised by hoteliers.

E-marketing is the mix of modern communication technology and traditional principles that marketers usually apply.

electronic media, more known as the internet (

used by your company via direct emails, blogs, SMS or text messaging, web pages, videos, banners, pictures, advertisements (like pay per click, display or social media advertising)

the global cybersecurity market is set to increase to $270 billion by 2026. This signals the priority boardrooms have placed on cyber risk management even as digital transformation takes place en masse.

COVID-19 has become the catalyst to trigger change in the ways we manage and operate technology.

Virtual desktops emulate a computer system so that IT can control access as such adding input/output devices as well as software and applications. This could become an important control point when remote workers are operating outside the safety of a corporate network.