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

A new study done by IBM has discovered that nearly sixty percent of organizations are embracing the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), having their sights set on improving privacy, security, and data management. This is a relief to see as this particular subject in the hospitality industry has frequently come up as a major talking point with the developing technologies in the industry; the fact that industry leaders are viewing the GDPR in this manner rather than a compliance issue/restriction is refreshing. Seventy percent of survey responders are disposing data ahead of the deadline for compliance in an attempt to reduce their exposure. IBM did a separate poll that found only twenty percent of US consumers completely trusted organizations to maintain the privacy of their data. Due to this, businesses are using the recent GDPR compliance as a statement to consumers that they're looking to build trust and reliability with customers and drive innovation. However, even with the opportunities at hand, only thirty six percent of responders believed they will be fully compliant by the deadline. To minimize the amount of data an organization is managing, companies are taking measures such as reducing the number of people who have access to personal data or simply cutting down on the amount of data stored. Additionally, studies have found that the primary challenges organizations are facing with the GDPR include finding all the of the personal data stored in their business, ensuring the accuracy of said data, and making sure this data is in compliance in how it is shared or used. Another challenge to the new compliance is that companies are to report data breaches to regulators within 72 hours of the breach, yet IBM has found that only thirty one percent of companies have taken a look at the measures they have in place for incident response to account for this new rule in compliance.

The hospitality industry today is said to be one of the fastest growing sectors in the world, as demands for travel accompanied by a healthy economy has pushed a flourishing industry. As the industry grows, businesses are having to become more cost/profit-conscious while maintaining an increased importance on price, quality, and level of service, all the while sustaining a profitable organization. The article states that business owners are relying more on financial data to ensure maximum efficiency and profitability out of each and every contract. The article goes on to discuss three new smart-technology accounting solutions for various industry challenges. Cloud-based reporting systems are beneficial as the hospitality industry has many different waged employees that make payroll challenging; cloud-based systems make monitoring and managing staff significantly easier. With all of the varying data that the hospitality industry finds necessary, it is often easy to be overwhelmed with data/numbers. Data from one source may indicate trends in one direction while data from another source may contradict. Operations management platforms can be put into play that can decipher through the data and find out the important details like what efficiencies can be improved and how to best reduce expenses. These platforms combine critical accounting and performance data to benefit business owners by identifying trends and aiding better informed decisions. Lastly, the article finishes with how the hospitality industry can be unpredictable and that back-up accounting teams may be necessary in times of distress.

This article discusses the hospitality industry's developing technology sector, claiming an age of interconnectivity. This industry has long been plagued by the stereotype of being behind technologically, largely due to long standing and set-in ways that utilize old systems. A few numbers worth mentioning include enterprise hospitality spending an average of 3.5 percent of revenue on IT versus 7.9 percent for financial services, 6.1 percent for public sector, and 5.9 for high tech. In a study done by Lodging Technology Study, 53 percent of hoteliers cited that the outdated tech architecture set-in and the effort it would take to change them is what keeps people from investing in new technologies. Fortunately since then, this sector has been gaining momentum, expecting to be the fastest growing IT sector between 2018 and 2021. The article continues on talking about the barrier of integration fees and how tech innovators today are forced to pay massive fees to be compatible with existing systems, which carry on to consumers of these technologies. For hoteliers to utilize these new technologies, large sums of money have to be paid upfront and there's a significant lag in actually getting to try the product. The rest of the article discusses a few points we do in this week's module: pros and cons to two-way interconnectivity in PMS systems and third party technology providers.

http://lodgingmagazine.com/study-2017-a-record-year-for-gds-hotel-bookings/

In 2017, a study done by TravelClick and Phoenix Marketing International of nine-hundred travel agents in fifty-two countries reported a record use of global distribution systems to make hotel reservations, citing that booking growth exceeded sixty-eight million reservations (two million more than 2016). Amongst various trends found that support GDS usage-growth, GDS hotel bookings and ADR's generated through travel agents were on the rise. Rate parity was a topic of choice in that most travel agents felt that GDS's should offer it, sustaining constant rates for an identical product. The study also mentions how amenities are becoming increasingly relevant in regard to travel agent's booking behaviors, favoring amenities such as swimming pools, free parking, airport shuttles or transfer, hotel gyms, and early check-in/check-out. The article concludes with a statement explaining how alternative lodging did not seem to be having a great impact on the GDS, even though there had been quite an upsurge in that particular industry.

http://lodgingmagazine.com/study-shows-40-percent-of-large-businesses-to-adopt-ai-chatbots-or-assistants-by-2019/

Intelligent assistants and AI chatbots have begun to take over customer service in all forms of businesses. Spiceworks' recently released a survey result and analyses on businesses adopting and using these virtual assistants. According to their results, within the next year roughly 40 percent of businesses with more than 500 employees will adopt at least one intelligent assistant or AI chatbot. Smaller businesses are less expected to adopt these virtual assistants, but roughly a quarter of them still will.
The most common virtual assistants are Microsoft's Cortana and Apple's Siri. Most prevalent usage is for voice to text dictation, support team collaboration, and employee calendar management. Less than 15 percent of the companies surveyed used AI chatbots and assistants for customer service or IT help.
Spiceworks also looked at why companies have not implemented these forms of technology. Half of the respondents indicated there was no use in their workplace. Less than a third were too scared of the security and privacy uncertainties. Only a quarter held out due to cost. Shockingly, a majority of the people did not feel that AI chatbots and assistants will put their jobs at risk. Spiceworks' senior technology analyst said AI is rapidly advancing and integrating therefore companies should be preparing to handle this technology soon. Unfortunately, most of the IT professionals surveyed lacked confidence in their organization's abilities to implement and sustain AI technology.

http://lodgingmagazine.com/streamlining-maintenance-across-hotel-portfolio/

In this article, the author focuses on how to streamline maintenance in hotels via a hotel management software by Quore. Quore's software enables hotel engineers to work with the maintenance staff through any cloud-based mobile device, such as an Ipad or Iphone. The mobile device allows the staff to inspect and document problems while simultaneously putting in work orders and recommendations to fix issues. Not only does the program track problems and maintain accountability with the individual hotel's staff, it can also analyze this data to shows trends and provide an overview of major issues as well as employee performance. In addition, the system also features a preventative maintenance schedule to ensure periodical inspections are done at appropriate intervals thus improving the lifetime of the hotel equipment. A report is generated and can be sent to the general manager daily and corporate weekly to allow everyone to monitor the status of the hotel from the room-level issues all the way to the quality of maintenance of the entire hotel. This is an effective method to monitor the status of multiple hotels at once, perfect for any small management company.