With 110,000 employees in more than 750 properties, it has been a challenge for Starwood of making current data accessible to authorized users. So Starwood recently deployed Information Builders' WebFOCUS to augment their SAP suite of applications, and the results are accommodating HR professionals worldwide. This system boosts the productivity and reduce manual labor. The WebFOCUS Managed Reporting environment made it easy to develop standard reports, set up domains for various properties and divisions, and manage the reporting infrastructure from a central location. 

virtual events provider ON24, which announced today that it has teamed up with Veteran Recruiting Services - the market leader in virtual career fairs for the military community - to host the first-ever virtual career fair for veterans with service-related disabilities. The career fair gives disabled veterans the opportunity to benefit from the advantages that virtual meetings offer, not the least of which is having equal access to the event, with no physical travel required.

IHG launched Guest Reviews and Ratings for each of its seven existing hotel brand websites in Chinese, English, German and Spanish. For customers, this service gives online customers the convenience of reading authentic customer feedback while bookend their stays. For hotels, this service can verify the guests who really stayed in IHG's hotels and gave an unbiased review for recent stay.  IHG is always at the forefront of online booking in this industry. it was the first hotel to introduce online booking system in 1995. In 2002 IHG pioneered Best Price Guaranteed. 

this article talks about five tech tips that help to prevent employee theft. for problem 1 taking money from the register, CCTV can help, but internet protocol cameras can bring more convenience and new features. For copying the company's digital asset, using cloud-based security services, company can monitor where its information has been removed. For stealing customer data, encrypting customer data can be vital in dealing with this problem. For pilfering products, RFID readers can help detect either up to 40 feet way or up to 300 feet away. For cheating on time sheets, biometric identification systems keep employees accountable for their time on the job and prevent "buddy punching," the practice of having colleagues clock their peers in and out.

This article is about a new meeting system that IHG launched for meeting and events booking across 23 of its hotels in Australia and New Zealand.It can be used by any standard web browser or smartphone. It is also equipped to handle various unique business needs including multiple types of events and attendees as well as a wide range of booking methods, payment types, languages and currencies. * Online Hotel Booking: It can help to encourage more delegates to book within the block.  * Live Event Tracking: Meeting organisers can optimise their room block contracts.  * Automated Room Lists: it can secure - eliminating the risk associated with transferring private financial detail across email.  * Increased Pick-up: It will help to maximise event traction through automated email reminders which act as an early warning system for delegates and in turn, maximise block traction.  * Professional Email Marketing: hotels are able to leverage GroupMAX's integrated email marketing platform to create new service opportunities which can be communicated to delegates prior to arrival.

Instead of introducing some new technology, this article is more like an advertisement. it does not introduce much information about this technology and it is not a news for us to know a cloud based PMS. But cloud based PMS is still not widely used in the industry, while Benchmark is one step ahead. Except the benefit of reduce hardware costs for investors, closed based accounting system also make it easier for its headquarter to protect corporate and guest data as well as maintain these data. With this benefit, corporate is able to monitor the operations of its hotels. 

POS is quite widely used in the field, at least in some restaurant chains. But this article points it out that although many restaurants are using POS, they still underestimate how useful this system can be. So this article introduces five features that POS can have if managers integrate these into POS. All of these features introduced in this article can be summarized into one word, that is tracking！POS can help to keep a track customer information and their preference to build a customer loyalty; POS can track inventory without counting every item in storage; POS can track employee's working hours and give managers alarm; POS can even track the menu information to help managers to make judgements if the menu item are profitable.  It is an investment to have a POS and it is also a waste of using only part of POS features. 

Frontdesk Anywhere provides not only a common feature of sharing information with reservation system, but it makes a further step and integrate hotel management, reservation system with travel agents. Although the advantage that this article discussed include that customer will no longer be mislead and have accurate information. But actually, oversell happens all the time in hospitality industry. So it means more to hotel that hotels may save lots of labors as well as expenses to keep the information for travel agents updated. 

In the video we had about e-wastes, people cannot really know where their dumped devices would be and most of them are not really care about recycling. This new ATM can collect used devices directly from users and the company which is doing this is definitely certified by government which will follow the laws and recycle them. This machine eliminates the possible that people just dump the devices, because they will be motivated by the value of recycling;. This is not really a cutting edge technology, but the meaning of this is that it can increase the percentage of e-wastes recycling.

This GDS allows over 300 major airlines to get connected with thousands of points of Sale and this platform, consisted by only 3 major ticket distributors known as a GDS other than the airline website. Airlines are paying around $7 billion dollars per year for using GDSs. This is a huge amount and consumers have to pay this.  But at this moment, GDS is still needed as a neutral technology platform especially for small travel agencies.  

this article introduces the two mainly cloud computing platform, one is Windows Server 2012 from Microsoft, the other is VMworld 2012. As an industry giant, Microsoft wants to provide a platform for companies to be able to manage between different data centers. As a NO 1 OS provider, Microsoft can ensure the consistency between its products. On the other hand, VMware would like to provide multivendor clouds where customers wish to move across environments with different workloads. 

Hotel lock vendor SSA ABLOY launched a four-month pilot at the Clarion Hotel Stockholm. The program can allow hotel to send hotel room key directly to guests' mobile phones before arrival.  With the mobile key, hotel guests can check-in and out using their mobile phones.  In addition of increasing guest experience, mobile phone can also increase security, it allows hotel to revoked the key and reissue. At the same time, decreasing using of physical cards can save the environment.