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Contents contributed and discussions participated by msbode

msbode

Event Technology: Trends and Strategy for 2020 - 0 views

  • the main types of event technology you should really care about
  • The ones that can make a difference for you in your planning process, for attendees to make the event more memorable and for sponsors to make their investment worthwhile.
  • Event Technology for Better Venue And Destination Tools
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  • Event Technology for Registration And Check-In
  • Event Technology: Event and Project Management Software
  • Event Technology: Mobile Apps, AI And Concierge Tools
  • Event Technology: Engagement and Live Interaction Tools
  • Event Technology: Networking and Matchmaking Tools
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    In this article, the author highlights 7 types of event technologies that event managers and planners should focus on in a tidal wave of event technology being offered today. Among the event technology mentioned advice is given along with step by instructions on how to access the various sites/ platforms and what to look for and expect.
msbode

Tourism security in an age of cyber threats | NTA Courier - 0 views

shared by msbode on 13 Feb 20 - No Cached
kmert005 liked it
  • the safety of clients and staff has to be the No. 1 priority.
  • hat means contingency plans must be updated on a regular basis and security plans must show adequate flexibility to incorporate good customer service and proper protection.
  • it is essential to dispel the idea that tourism security is static.
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  • leisure travel is an expendable industry, and there is nothing that can destroy the industry’s reputation more effectively than a lack of security or safety.
  • the latest threat to the industry was underlined by the hacking of Marriott International’s Starwood database, potentially exposing the personal information of approximately half a billion people.
  • This cyberbreach serves as an example that the world of tourism security is fast-changing.
  •  It is essential that every tourism entity assume that, at some point, it will suffer some form of attack, whether physical or cyber. Do not wait for an attack to occur to begin to figure out how to mitigate the damage. Remember that an attack not only damages the client, but it also harms the entire industry.
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    In this article, the author emphasizes that security in the tourism industry should be number one. With the advent of technology, cyber contingency plans must be a part of the overall security plans of tourism businesses. The author also admonishes hospitality businesses to be proactive when dealing with cyber security breaches to withstand malware and infections as well as to be honest with customers when security breaches occur to maintain the customer's trust.
msbode

New Study Reveals Technology Investment Priorities for Hotels - 0 views

  • Chain hotels 77% more likely to increase technology investments, while independent counterparts prioritize room renovation
  • Reliance on technology is becoming increasingly important in the lodging industry as hotels begin to recognize how they can gain key competitive advantage with strategic technology investments.
  • cost continues to be the key barrier with technology adoption for many hoteliers
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  • technology investment decisions are based on affordability and value.
  • more than half of the chain hotels prioritize technology that seamlessly integrates with their existing systems.
  • small independent hotels surveyed, 1 in 4 cited complexity as their biggest challenge when adopting technology, with 1 in 3 saying ease of use is a priority when evaluating solutions.
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    This article summarizes the findings taken from research done within the Expedia Group's global hotelier panel consisting of 1,215 hotelier participants that used a choice-based study to compare technology investments between defined hotel chains and small independent hotels. In summary, chain hotels were likely to invest twice as much in technology when compared to small independent hotels. Conversely, small independent hotels were likely to invest more in rooms reservations than chain hotels. The I.T investment strategy varied among the two hotel segments. Small independent hotels choose technology based on affordability, value, and complexity of technology, whereas chain hotels bought technology based on its ability to integrate into their existing systems, the price was not mentioned.
msbode

The Best Hotel POS Systems | Top Software Picks for 2020 - 0 views

shared by msbode on 29 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • The best hotel POS systems are designed to decrease manual hours, enhance customer experience, and streamline workflow.
  • hotel POS system is a complete solution that gives hotel owners the right tools to enhance guest experience and overall profitability.
  • In order to get the best for your hotel, you should look at features such as mobile ordering, all-in-one billing, powerful reporting, and customer relationship management.
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  • . Our Pick for Best Hotel POS System: Lightspeed
  • goes hand in hand with the full guest experience.
  • run your entire business from an iPad
  • The Most Affordable Multi-Location POS System: eZee Technosys
  • Best Integrated PMS/POS System: Hotelogix
  • Hotelogix is a comprehensive PMS that streamlines all major hotel operations; from reservation software, front desk, housekeeping, and yes, point of sale.
  • Best Windows-Based POS System: Agilsys
  • Ranging from online booking, mobile and stationary POS devices, and powerful reporting
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    In this article, the author creates a platform where four of the best hotel POS Systems updated as of January 2020 can easily be viewed and compared simultaneously. Showcasing each of their pros and cons allowing you as the hotelier/business owner to choose. Armed with all the important information on each option, their capabilities and features categories ranging from the best, most affordable, windows-based, all the way to the most easily integrated with your PMS system.
msbode

4 ways ecommerce is impacting the hospitality industry - Insights - 0 views

  • The ecommerce explosion has impacted the way business is done online
  • Enhanced customer service, automated marketing, customer-specific advertising
  • four ways ecommerce is impacting the hospitality industry
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  • A personalized service tailored to the customer
  • Virtual reality brings the experience to the customer
  • Tapping into an increasingly international market using data
  • Retargeting to chase up lost sales
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    In this article, the author gave a bird's eye view of how the hospitality industry in 2019 was impacted by e-commerce in 4 ways. Firstly, e-commerce focused on the individual to foster greater engagement and boost sales by creating a personalized experience for each guest, based on the data gathered on them. Secondly, through the adoption of virtual and augmented reality, e-commerce was able to allow customers to experience their products before purchase. Thirdly, e-commerce has given hospitality businesses, global access to clients that a brick and mortar business could not facilitate. Lastly, e-commerce has given hospitality businesses the ability to recapture lost sales, from potential customers who may have left their sites before purchasing.
msbode

The Future of Technology in Hospitality is Green | Hospitality Technology - 2 views

  • the fact that millennials (those born roughly between 1982 and 1996), are going to be the largest generation in the country’s history (at 83.1 million).
  • Simple math tells us that the buying power at large is mainly in their hands.
  • For example, more LED lighting throughout their facilities with sensors can help keep costs down while reducing energy waste.
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  • he hospitality industry is also one known for producing exorbitant amounts of waste.
  • In order to make more green, here are some of the tactics within the headlines of late that are being used to keep up with the sustainable practices to woo this generation, and those others to come.
  • Thanks to technology, hotels have been making strides to becoming more environmentally friendly without breaking the bank.
  • According to Forbes, millennials consider social responsibility and environmental friendliness when making their purchases, so brands have to rise to these significant expectations millennials have when it comes to spending their money.
  • Through the use of an intelligent camera, smart scales and AI-based smart meter technology, Winnow Vision analyses ingredients during food preparation, as well as plates returned to the kitchen, to assess which food items are most wasted and in what quantities.
  • Cruises Also Taking a Stand with Tech
  • the cruise line is implementing technology to help reduce its ecological impact including clean LNG as fuel on its new ships, installing an Advanced Emission Purification system on most of its fleet, making progress with its program to eliminate single-use plastics, and is increasing its number of ships that are zero landfill capable
  • Hotels Continue to Innovate
  • According to the American Hotel & Lodging Association (AHLA) trend survey released earlier this year, supporting sustainable initiatives remains important to the lodging industry as a whole.
  • This tells us that hotels need to continue to innovate and the future of technology in hospitality has to be green, or those brands that do not adopt to these emerging standards face being left behind.
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    This article emphasizes how imperative it is for hospitality businesses to stay on the cutting edge of technology as a part of their business design and strategy if they want to survive in today's competitive market and remain in it, in the near future. The author expresses that today's hospitality market is being driven by Millennials' "the largest generation in the country's history" who patronize businesses that are socially and environmentally responsible. Armed with this information to capture their targeted market, more and more hotels are now incorporating from inception within their physical blueprint infrastructure that is environmentally sustainable and cost-effective. As well as obtaining Green certifications and implementing sustainable software to reduce waste and minimize leakages. This concept has also been adopted by cruise ship operators to reduce environmental impact through the use of technology.
msbode

5 Technology Trends Impacting the Hospitality Sector - 4 views

  • The hospitality sector has long recognized the value of technology as a catalyst to providing outstanding guest experiences and reducing operational inefficiencies. Technology is so important to the overall mission of many locations that, despite softening IT budgets in 2017, 52 percent of hotels planned to increase their IT investments while 47 percent planned to spend the same as the previous year
  • The type of technology a location spends its IT dollars on is becoming even more critical, as changing consumer attitudes and expectations continually raise the bar for excellent guest services.
  • Five technologies in particular—service automation, fixed mobile convergence, location-based services, connected meeting rooms, and chatbots and mobile apps—are poised to change the guest experience and create areas of opportunity for hospitality locations to become differentiators and innovators in an already technology-centric industry.
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  • With service automation, both customer-facing and customer-centric activities are automated, freeing staff to provide more meaningful guest experiences or enabling locations to work at peak efficiency even with a reduced headcount.
  • One recent study noted 56 percent of millennials and 50 percent of Gen Xers prefer to use a loyalty app over a plastic loyalty card.[
  • In creating a guest experience that addresses the needs of “workcationers” and “bleisure travelers”, hotels and other hospitality sites must provide technologies that will help travelers get their work done in the most efficient and impactful way possible
  • Keeping guests happy from check-in to check-out—and anytime in between—is one of the main tenets of hospitality technology. Location-based services are a perfect example, and one technology that also serves to help the hotel, conference center and other hospitality locations increase their efficiency.
  • In embracing the next generation of technologies, hotels, conference centers and other hospitality locations first must prepare their networks to certify they are able to handle the increase in traffic and demand for bandwidth.
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    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.
msbode

6 Lessons That Hotels Must Learn From E-Commerce - 0 views

  • First impressions count. Guests form an opinion of your hotel as soon as they try to make a booking. By making that process as swift and painless as possible you will see improvements in your number of direct customers.
  • the average basket abandonment rate in e-commerce is around 65%, in travel it’s over 80%.
  • Some experts estimate that for hotels specifically the rate of booking abandonments reaches over 90%.
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    This article succinctly suggests 6 ways how a hotel can make their e-commerce efforts more rewarding; by reducing friction for users on the hotel's website, by having fewer clicks from discovery to purchase, using speed as their friend with a faster hotel website, and faster hotel booking process, getting to the point by providing the option for users to book right away, not confusing the user by taking them away to a different URL that has different branding to the rest of their hotel's site, triple testing their hotel's website functions or options to determine if they generate additional revenue if not, remove it and test again.
msbode

Ensuring Software Integrity in IoT Devices - 3 views

  • oT is defined as the Internet of Things. The Internet of Things refers to the ever-growing network of physical objects that feature an IP address for internet connectivity, and the communication that occurs between these objects and other Internet-enabled devices and systems
  • Gartner predicts that there will be 20.4 billion connected Internet of Things (IoT) devices by 2020, with 5.5 million new things getting connected every day
  • more than half of major new business processes and systems will include an IoT component by 2020
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  • Manufacturers are rushing products to market with little or no thought to security, often including hardcoded passwords or known vulnerable software libraries. While this problem is most obvious in the consumer space (which gets the most news coverage), vulnerable IoT devices are present in every business sector as well
  • The TPM stores secret keys, passwords, and digital certificates in its secure internal storage protecting them from software and physical attacks. The TPM acts as a root of trust for checking platform integrity at boot time (i.e., check against any malicious change). A cryptographic hash value of the platform configuration is calculated and compared against the precomputed hash value of the platform. Access to the platform is denied if the integrity check fails [4]. This is the beginning of the “chain-of-trust” for software modules that are subsequently initiated. This transitive trust mechanism is one of the important security features in trust computing. It uses the trust root as a starting point to establish a chain of trust model, in the order of trust root, boot loader, OS, and Application.
  • Secure boot provides the foundation for Trusted Boot, which extends the trust boundary to the boot process and eventually the operating system.
  • software attestation attempts to achieve a dynamic root of trust without specific hardware support. This method has the advantage of not requiring any stored secrets (cryptographic keys or passwords) and allows applications or modules to be updated, which may not be possible if hash values are stored in immutable formats, such as a TPM chip
  • While Secure Boot validates the platform and firmware, Trusted Boot is generally defined as verifying each software module before execution and extending the chain-of-trust to the entire operating system. During the boot sequence, the digest of each executing program is recorded before it executes. A TPM (Trusted Platform Module) is used to store all these records and then report on them securely.
  • It is important to note that Trusted Boot requires a TPM chip so the operating system can see the chain of execution, thus it may not be an option for some IoT devices. Lack of trusted boot support would allow an attacker with physical access, or using a software vulnerability during run time, to potentially modify the stored code and compromise the device.
  • There are many other attack possibilities to consider with IoT devices. For example, existing TPM architectures do not support runtime integrity checking and this allows attackers to exploit vulnerabilities to modify the program after it has been verified (at time of check or TOC) but before the time of its use (at time of use or TOU) to trigger unintended program behavior, such as the execution of malicious code or the leaking of sensitive data
  • Physical attack is a viable method of compromising the integrity of a device. Modifying and replacing firmware by an attacker may be worth the effort, depending on the perceived value of the device or the data it may access (such as a video camera or ATM). Attackers can go as far as removing memory and reading its contents.
  • a device built today can become a major problem tomorrow
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    The purpose of this article was to review the available literature on the subject of ensuring software integrity for IoT (Internet of Things) devices, focusing on detecting and preventing modification of the original software, so that the device cannot be used for unintended purposes. The literature reviewed; secure boot, trusted boot and runtime security. Concluding that no one single control is going to adequately protect a device the solution based upon 25 years of experience is to create a multi-layered approach to security that starts at the beginning when power is applied, establishes a trusted computing baseline, and anchors that trust in something immutable that cannot be tampered with. Additionally, because a device built today can become a major problem tomorrow, due to them having hardcore keys "set and forget", the internet will then have literally billions of obsolete hosts in the coming years. Therefore it is important for MIS Managers/ Consultants investigate how to change the game in order to mitigate the damage or economic value of new systems being breached and by asking questions such as 'Can we even in the presence of a malicious attacker offer some limited form of security for the most valuable transactions (such as e-banking) or assets?' and 'Can we make the 'business' of the attackers less attractive by applying security technologies that are particularly tailored towards destroying the business model of the attackers?'
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