AR is closer than you think! The Marriott Moxy brand is launching a limited-time AR experience at select hotels. QR codes, avatars, and holographs!

AI continues to evolve in fast food locations. McDonalds is piloting voice recognition systems in their drive thrus hoping to hit their 95% accuracy benchmark before deciding whether to roll this out to 14,000 McDonalds locations. The technology is improving ordering processing on average by 20 seconds per order and could reduce human labor hours by 9 hours per day.

High profile hotels near large events have had to respond to events such as mass shootings since the 2017 Las Vegas attack where a guest used as hotel room to carry out the shooting. Concert venues and large hotels are now using surveillance drones and predictive threat analysis to enable their staff to recognize patterns that could indicate signs of trouble. Security costs at large venues are expensive, and they are being passed on via ticket prices. Hotels need to evaluate their need for an active shooter plan and evaluate their "do not disturb" policies and train their staff to alert management when they are unable to enter a guest room, or when they recognize something out of the ordinary.

At some point, we've all probably heard that hotel keycards store guests' personal information and that puts our privacy at risk and perhaps even exposes us to credit card fraud. This is pure myth. Hotels encode the least amount of information possible (a term called least privilege) on a keycard, limiting it to room #, arrival and departure date. The only way anyone's personal information could get onto a keycard is for someone to reuse a hotel keycard to program it as a credit card, and that information would not be obtained from a hotel PMS system.

Hotel certified wedding planners and event and catering managers can promote social media walls to weddings, social groups, and business conventions to not only enhance the guests' hotel experience, but to also generate organic UGC (user generated content) to use in its social media marketing strategy. A relatively minimal amount of hardware is required as building a social wall can be accomplished with either an LCD projector or LED screens and a social media aggregator tool. Hotels can create new revenue streams for their F&B Department.

Cornell gathered a few industry design and green tech experts to discuss the future of sustainable technology in hotels. Modular hotel buildouts can save construction waste and shorten build times, but developers can rarely afford the investment in sustainability practices that exceed code requirements. I see this daily in my career. The benefits are more long-term and if developers are not holding onto the asset long-term, they will not really see an ROI on LEED certifications, etc. CRMs can be used to track guests' digital breadcrumbs and build guest preferences in its database. Building data collection systems into the infrastructure of the hotel will give owners an overall view of where it can improve its sustainability practices.

Beacon technology is an important part of a personalized eMarketing strategy. The technology pings guests through an app to solicit a financial transaction. This increases app engagement and app retention and increases brand loyalty when done right. This article points out some uses for beacon technology beyond the obvious goal of driving sales into hotel restaurants, spas, or golf courses. Hotels have been successful using the technology in tracking hotel assets (i.e. luggage carts and room service trays), to tracking vendors on property, to determining which employee is most able to quickly deliver an item to a guest. I think beacon technology, when integrated with a PMS, could be used to increase loyalty program enrollment by identifying non-member guests and prompting them to enroll at opportune times during their stay (i.e. right after check-in or just prior to check-out).

There is often talk about how robots are replacing or eliminating hotel jobs. This article is a good balance of how human workers can co-exist with their co-bots (co-workers). ROI's on robotics are starting to pencil and this favors owners as robotics can help bridge the gap in labor shortages. Robotics can be used to do mundane and repetitive tasks (mostly cleaning and delivering items) and leave the more personal interactions up to the humans.

The relationship with OTAs should be about finding the right balance (or mix of business) for your specific hotel. A commonly held point of view is that OTA commissions are exorbitant (in dollars, or as a % of revenue), but shouldn't we be glad if they sold a room we were not going to sell otherwise?

The major hotel chains are influencing legislation and also now requiring employee safety devices (ESDs) to make the workplace safer for employees (i.e. room service attendants or housekeepers) who find themselves alone in guest rooms with ill-intentioned guests. ESDs can also be appropriate for large resorts with beach personnel, activities personnel, or other positions that find themselves in enclosed, or remote areas with less security. Not every hotel has a security department that can constantly monitor cameras and ESDs. Will these devices present more strain on hotel wireless networks? That depends. Hoteliers need to consider whether these devices will be provided by or monitored through their keylock vendor, through their guest room entertainment vendor, or through a wireless provider. Could there be a benefit to an ESD interface with the PMS? I'm not finding an obvious answer. Hotels, varying in room count, are providing ESDs that range from whistles to wireless to BLE or RFID enabled. Hotel owners and management companies have the responsibility to research the most appropriate solution for their hotel without undermining the safety and privacy of their employees and their hotel networks.

This article explains the hardware (i.e. failover routers, dual-WAN routers) that are the key to internet redundancy when large business can not afford to have an outage. As businesses rely more and more on cloud-based computing, it is becoming more and more costly to have an internet outage. While the article might sell a good story, I don't feel like things are quite as good as advertised when trying to apply this in a hotel setting where oftentimes franchisor IT requirements only allow one static IP address and these routers require multiple IP addresses. I've personally experienced failures in the "last mile" of infrastructure (i.e. construction cuts a line or gophers chew fiberoptic cable) that even if the hotel has a failover router with multiple ISPs, the hotel would have experienced a complete outage due to the fact that both carriers were physically sharing the last mile. Maybe wireless network failover routers have more of a chance to thwart gophers and construction equipment? Conduct proper research to make sure your franchisor could accommodate a failover router.

China is going to be selling a lot fewer alarm clocks to Marriott as travelers rely more and more on their mobile devices. Since this article was published in July 2021, Marriott has since made it official that alarm clocks are no longer required in guest rooms. The mobile phone has made the alarm clock requirement obsolete. The majority of travelers view this as a positive change as travelers complain about the cleanliness of the alarm clock, being awakened by the previous guest's set alarm that hotel staff does not cancel, needing space on the nightstand for their own mobile devices, and the glare of backlit numerals interfering with their sleep at night. Owners appreciate the cost savings, yet their hotels may experience an influx of wake-up call requests in the absence of the alarm clock; however, most phone systems allow guests to set their own wake-up call through the telephone without operator assistance.