she urges HR professionals to first look for a tool that will integrate with any existing systems, including payroll, then make a list of the features they want to automate, including recruiting, performance management, time entry and compensation.

Fewer data errors, more-efficient recruiting, better performance management tracking and shorter time to fill vacancies are also measures that define the business value of an HRIS, Carney says.

The actual cost of your HRIS will vary wildly depending on the modules you choose, number of employees, the vendor, the robustness of the offering and whether you go with an installed or software-as-a-service model.

The deployment of GroupMAX optimizes event housing management, communications, booking processes and logistics for planners working with The Red Lion Hotel on the River – activities that would otherwise be extremely manual in nature and complex.

equipped with a powerful set of tools that include various templates and themes, libraries, bundles and customized event websites, where guests can make reservations and manage their bookings online.

The booking process for each event also includes a dedicated social network, which helps drive attendance and extend the event lifecycle, allowing attendees to connect before, during and after the event. An event-centric social networking option dramatically boosts the perceived value of the event.

Working with Spectrio, The Hutton Hotel utilized a mixture of this video content and still photos combined with music and narration and links to event pages on Hutton’s website for this new e-mail campaign, which would showcase the widest array of possibilities for events from corporate meetings to social gatherings that could be held at the hotel. The blast was sent out this past spring to more than 14,000 email addresses of meeting planners who have either been to the property or were with the hotel through other efforts,  and the results were that 16.88% unique visitors read the message, up from the normal 12% rate that was the norm for the hotel’s e-mail efforts.   The campaign has helped to raise awareness for the hotel, and some current hotel guests have even stated that they had not been cognizant of the event space until seeing the video e-mail. Ultimately the hotel’s management has learned that to use an effective e-mail for marking purposes, video doesn't have to be specially shot footage or even be full-motion video, it could be done with graphic, pre-existing footage. Due to the success of the campaign, The Hutton Hotel plans to create a new video and send another targeted email to its corporate guests

In a new White Paper, the world leader in mobile-based access management solutions identifies problems with electronic locks installed in more than four million hotel room doors, and offers an independently security audited "LOCKFIX" solution. Hotels vulnerable to potential security threats are invited to register to receive a copy of the report and be armed against such attacks with the power of smartphones.

Anyone can learn how to build a device quickly and inexpensively that triggers the lock's open mechanism in the fraction of a second. Last week, new hackers posted a video on YouTube showing how circuitry hidden inside a dry erase marker can unlock a hotel room door.

With a collective team representing more than 100 years in electronic locking and security systems expertise for hotels and other facilities, OpenWays offers innovative and state of the art mobile-device based access management solutions allowing guests to bypass the front desk, proceed directly to their room and securely open their lock with their cell phone. OpenWays already offers upgrade kits compatible with the major electronic lock brands including the locks in question

The newBrandAnalytics solution not only aggregates reviews online, but it also reads and processes all the unstructured feedback to derive actionable opportunities on a per-property basis

“The beauty of harnessing all of this data is it’s more of a conversation that we are getting back from guests now,” Murray insists. “It’s an instantaneous check about what they feel about a product. Get into any customer’s head or heart at the moment they are feeling it and you can move that customer much faster and certainly turn them around much quicker. If they get the feeling that you found out about a problem and reacted to it before they even thought to tell you about it because they put it on some Twitter feed, and they come back to their room and it’s already been fixed — that’s real serious stuff.”  

Falling solidly into the must-have bucket, HHM focuses significant investment in providing guests with the bandwidth and connectivity they need for work and play. “Where I believe our industry is struggling, is trying to identify where we are allowing complimentary Internet or having basic usage be free, but other services have a fee attached,” Kakarla

Since it went into effect in October of 2011, the Durbin Amendment changed the architecture of swipe fees for debit card transactions. Its impact on the hospitality industry is mostly felt by restaurants where debit cards are most commonly used, and its subsequent effect on the supply chain of payment transactions within the industry is difficult to ascertain.

“While the Federal Reserve’s rule significantly brought down debit swipe fees for many merchants, some small businesses will pay higher fees on smaller ticket transactions — evidence that the Fed provided card networks like Visa and MasterCard too much latitude to increase rates well above a reasonable and proportional level,” said Scott DeFife, executive vice president of policy and government affairs for the NRA in an earlier statement.

“The hospitality industry has not, as yet, presented a unified front on the Durbin Amendment and similar actions,” says business attorney Robert Braun, partner, Jeffer Mangels Butler & Mitchell LLP, (www.jmbm.com) Los Angeles, California. “We also have to consider whether there will be significant federal legislation in an election year, when attention is being drawn elsewhere. We might be looking, however, to the impact of implementing regulation and to legislation adopted by states, which could have an impact on credit card transactions.”

Two Romanian nationals have plead guilty for participating in an international, multimillion-dollar scheme to remotely hack into and steal payment card data from hundreds of U.S. merchants’ computers, including a great number of Subway restaurants. Federal prosecutors noted that the conspiracies involved more than 146,000 compromised cards and more than $10 million in losses.

Bosnian continues, “The reality is that anyone with an Internet connection can search for, identify and target  remote applications that businesses rely on – the problem facing the industry is that there is not sufficient security and protection around the entry points to these applications. Once inside, attackers have free reign on the network. If you examine the list of the recent, high-profile data breaches that have plagued organizations, including Global Payments, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Utah healthcare breach, etc…, the common denominator is that the attackers focused on gaining access to the privileged or administrative accounts.” 

About 150 mid-scale and up-scale hotels around the world answered a questionnaire investigating the training on the PMS (measured by number of days, budget, and training provider) and performance (measured by occupancy, ADR, GOR). Most hotels (65%) stated that they had no budget for training on the PMS in 2011 and 32% of hotels offered no training at all to their employees on the PMS. 40% of the hotels surveyed provided up to 3 training days per year (Chart 2). Most of the training is conducted internally, rather than using the PMS providers. In cases where there is no training, the new employees are simply "shown the ropes" by their supervisors (Chart 3). As can be seen in chart 1 below, there is little/ no budget allocated to training.

Revenues of hotels are much higher as the PMS training budget went above 5000 Euros per year

Early indications from this ongoing research project show that effective management of the PMS training resources (e.g. training days, budget) may result in increased revenues for the hotels.

Corporate buyers will be able to gain greater control over hotel room rate negotiations and compliance with the inclusion of intelligent rate parameter data in their benchmarking reports. RateTiger’s introduction of rate filtering technology to its award winning rate data product, RTCorp, will provide direct hotel pricing comparisons in line with hotel product type.

Corporate buyers will be able to gain greater control over hotel room rate negotiations and compliance with the inclusion of intelligent rate parameter data in their benchmarking reports. RateTiger’s introduction of rate filtering technology to its award winning rate data product, RTCorp, will provide direct hotel pricing comparisons in line with hotel product type.

orporate buyers will have the business intelligence to match travel expenditure to their budgets and give travelers greater flexibility of hotel choice based on Best Available Rates (BAR).