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In the very competitive sports landscape, the Dallas Mavericks have to find ways to separate themselves from the football crazed area. The Mavericks created a mural in Downtown Dallas with augmented reality that also provides fans an opportunity to "shoot the shot." It is another way sports and entertainment have looked to engage with fans.

Robots are being used more in replace of low-wage workers to reduce labor costs at a restaurant. The robots have proven to be efficient and reliable in the restaurant setting. The (human) server is able to serve more tables with the robot helping with food-running/cleaning and doesn't have to split tips with the robot. The downside is the displacement of workers by automation. Will we see robots being implemented more in restaurants?

The Ziosk products were popular before COVID19 but have now increased in popular after the spread of the virus. It allows for social distancing by ordering through the Ziosk that sits at tables in restaurants like Olive Garden, helping to minimize contact between the guest and the server.

From what I research from the article, VLAN as a local area network itself actually is quite secure cause the fake IP address means a private one.  And it is already encrypted. But the hackers had imitate the hotel's main server. As for the technology developing, it seems like the more secure the system make, the smarter the hacker would be. 

This article introduced how hotels improve their network to enhance security. To reduce the potential for stealing by theft and hacker, the W Dallas Hotel set up virtual local area networks. Compared with relatively rundimentary hub technology and encryption for Wi-Fi, the biggest advantage of this VLANs is to inhibit attackers from using computer to imitate the hotel'smain server. I think increaing a hotel network's security is very necessary, still, people should pay more attention to this and improve the techonology to make sure the security of all aspects.

In Dallas, hotels are trying to bring in technology to make things easier while bringing in a CRS system has just made it more complicated. Since there are so many online requests for hotel rooms the Central Reservation System cannot necessarily keep up with that which could be problem because if it cannot keep up then it is not going to be in a search for a new guest. InterContinental Hotels Groups is updating their CRS with a newer one that can handle the large amount of requests at one time but there is still a problem of speed. We like to see things happen immediately when we want it done and if it does not happen like that we might decide to leave the page and go somewhere else to book causing the company to lose out business. Before the internet when people needed to book hotel rooms and they went to a travel agent the agent would have to call around to see which property had availability, then find out if they property they wanted had specific rooms and rates they are looking for and then finally book the room at the specified rate. As soon as the internet came along the process became easier because it was all right there except not that much easier because it still could not do everything that we wanted it to.

Central Reservation Systems via the internet are good when they want to be and bad when they want to be. If there is a huge meeting booked last minute in a popular city during peak time there is going to be a huge influx of people trying to book hotels online at the same time and the CRS might not work as people would like it to causing people to get angry and not want to go to that specific hotel.

Central Reservation System is really a very good system which can improve the efficiency and speed of the hotel reservation.

Sabre Technology, based in Southlake, an affluent suburb of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, recently acquired neighboring technology company Genares. Genares now provides GDS connections to Sabre, in addition to other major players, including Apollo, Worldspan, and Amadeus. Genares provides CRS, hotel marketing, and revenue management solutions, particularly to independently-owned hotels and chains, with a network that is over 2,300 strong. This will provide Sabre some control of the market as new competitor Booking.com, owned by The Priceline Group, enters the B2B arena with its recent acquisitions of Seattle-based hotel digital marketing startup Buuteeq and Barcelona-based Hotel Ninjas. Genares became a part of Sabre Hospitality Solutions, a subsidiary of Sabre Technology, which generated $711.7 million of the $3.04 billion in revenue that Sabre made in 2013. The acquisition of Genares will give Sabre more avenues to access independent and boutique hotels. It is worth noting that Sabre Hospitality Solutions already controlled "approximately 27% share of third-party hospitality CRS hotel rooms distributed through [their] GDS," making it the largest third-party provider in this space last year.

Hertz introduces iphone apps to deliver extended travel experience to customers. The app is called My Explore, including 11 major cities in U.S. with most travel information. Each city app includes six categories: explore, Top Must See, Events, Favorites, Tours and neighborhoods. Those probably cover major needs during traveling.

this is a good article that goes over some trend changes in events, such as the Super Bowl, with regards to green initiatives. the Super Bowl committee developed a list of programs to make the event more sustainable; donating carbon credits, recycling, free bike programs, and more. I specially found it interesting that they recycled all the promotional material by collecting it and making it into other consumer products such as bags and wallets. I've always wondered why events as big as this one dont have recycling programs for the incredible amounts of wasted promotional items. When you think about it, not only does this help reduce waste but also helps generate some revenue from the products that are eventually sold. The article also shows that this trend seems to be happening at all levels from the committees, to the teams, and even the consumers! 

While food trucks have become extremely popular these days, they have been around as early as the 1800's! Before the gourmet food trucks started to pop up, street vendors selling hot dogs, pretzels and lunch food for office workers have been around for decades. Now with more and more people out of work or people who want the ability to be more creative with their own food with a small budget, food trucks have become more popular.  However some cities have restrictions such as Chicago, where a food truck cannot be parked within 200 feet of a restaurant.  LA, the government limits the number of permits issued for mobile food vendors because of the street congestion it produces.  Permits are also limited because traditional restaurants don't want to compete with the low priced street vendors. 

The Doubletree Dallas/Richardson hotel did a total overhaul of the security system and reopened. They choose the VISIONLINE and Signature RFID by VingCard to meet the travelers' demand of security, efficiency and reliability. What's more it is a cost-effective system which facilitate reliable wireless two-way communication by the host security and PMS systems. The VISIONLINE is a security control from the central location, utilizing RF-online communication capabilities that eliminate the need to travel to each guest room. The Signature RFID, advantages included remotely cancelling guest and staff keycards with one click, or identifying and changing low batteries communicate with multiple rooms at once, reducing the number of network components required for installation and so on. For the company, it is ease and exclusivity. The staff can maximize their efficiency to spend less time on maintenance and more time on customer service, increased reliability and performance at an affordable cost, highly reliable security, unprecedented convenience and ease-of-operation, decreasing the overall workload.

Site Minder by GDS experience, serves as good example to better understand the impact of a GDS's impact on the hotel industry. GDS by SiteMinder provides a single point of entry to over 500 000 travel agents across the globe, which means that hotels can target many type of travelers in multiple geographic regions. By connecting hotels directly to the world's major GDS providers - Sabre, Amadeus, and Travelport - and travel agent network, GDS by SiteMinder offers a major convenience to participating hotels. Through this service, hotels don't have to worry about signing up with each one of these providers. Another advantage of SiteMinder is its affordability; there are no commission fees, rather, just one flat transaction fee per reservation. The company offers free services from GDS experts and free technical account management advice which are other benefits. For instance, in another article, in mid-2013, South Beach Group who has boutique hotels in the heart of Miami Beach, decided to switch its 12 hotels to GDS by SiteMinder. After moving to GDS by SiteMinder, South Beach Group representative highlights the significant increase in bookings leading to a growth in annual revenues by17% in 2013. In essence, GDS by SiteMinder advertises participating hotels to more customers globally within an incomparable distribution platform, with real-time and two-way GDS connectivity. As we can see in the article, in 2016, just within 12 months the total number of users of GDS by SiteMinder increased from 250 to almost 900. This article underlines the importance of GDS for the growth of travel industry. With Site Minder by GDS, one can realize how GDS helps increase hotel bookings by placing hotels on more virtual channels (an analogue of supermarket shelves) globally.  

The article about "smart glass" discusses a new glass product that has Internet protocol and electrical power connections that allow the tinting to be adjusted or follow a program. Mentioned briefly in the article is another electrochromatic glass, SageGlass, produced by the French materials giant, Compagnie de Saint-Gobain SA. The pitch of the American company reviewed in the article, View, is that it will lower temperature control costs by 20% and that installation is also significantly less expensive than traditional glass. When installed as a test for DFW airport the restaurant in that area benefited from the more confortable atmosphere and lingering customers with an increase in alcohol sales of 80%. The intended benefit of saving on cooling cost and customer satisfaction is actually resulting in improved profits, this is the type of green technology that companies will gladly implement, because it helps their bottom line. I think this product is an all around win and improvement for airports, hotels, stadiums and any desitnation that has lots of large windows, the product is cost effective, improves customer satisfaction and increases revenue while using less energy for cooling.

the article gives examples of retail stores and how they use proximity marketing to promote their products

This article references the specifics of the M3 platform, which is a more efficient accounting software for hoteliers. After several test runs, M3 has proven to help several properties streamline their accounting process, track data in real time and cut costs where possible.

M3 is a useful hotel accounting software that can be used on mobile devices, according to the illustrations. As mentioned in this article, accounting software can do things that generic providers can't, like delivering actionable business intelligence. For M3, it also gains the property managers more benchmarking insight and turned a management company's IT department into a profit center that offers service. Furthermore, by replacing the IT department with two employees and a cloud-based accounting system, it saved a large sum for a management company.

In the hospitality industry it is extremely important to make sure the customers information (often financial) remains secure. Offsite data backups allow the organization to have remote access to their data from a service that provides a storage and recovery system in a different location than the primary server, thus securing the organizations data in multiple locations. Offsite backups also have the ability to easily share data which can be critical if data gets lost within the organization - the backup will automatically save a 'backup' copy. Lastly, it ensures an extra level of safety by maintaining scheduled backups to make sure no data is left unsaved.