Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

Shows the advantages of using an eMenu.

Carnival's and Royal Caribbean's CEOs agree that cruising will resume when "society decides it's ready for social gathering." They emphasized that the decision to resume cruises is not theirs alone, but will be guided by the CDC and other regulatory groups across the globe. Initially, they believe that shorter sailings will probably drive the markets. They stressed that that can and will establish screening and hygiene protocols but will be guided, once again, by the authorities in charge, as well as, by the people who actually do the traveling. In other words, when the people decide that the likelihood of contracting the virus has been mitigated and only poses a reasonable risk, then they will be more likely to resume traveling.

As an example of VR use for sustainable tourism, on October 16, the Boca Raton Museum of Art in Florida debuted the first of its kind, full-motion, 360-degree, interactive VR experience of the Machu Picchu and the Golden Empires of Peru exhibition. In order to preserve this historic site, less than one million visitors are allowed in each year. On-site use of VR tech for a synchronous guest experience is also being explored and has the potential to be disruptive to use of tour guides. Plus, VR technology provides such rich immersive travel experiences that traditional marketing tools like pictures or standard print ads cannot match.

EHL Insights is a Swiss based company that dove into what leaders in the Swiss hospitality industry believe in regard to disruptive innovations for the global industry. The article interviewed a few different leaders and got their take, like Wilhelm Konrad Weber, who believes that technology is affecting the hospitality industry but also poses a threat because hotel leaders are not necessarily ready to adapt/adopt to ever-changing technology. OTAs were mentioned as an example of the industry falling behind as these websites help eliminate loyalty. Weber also mentioned that innovation in the industry is evolutionary rather than disruptive due to the demands and expectations from investors and analysts. One person, Zia Chisti, is a skeptic when it comes to artificial intelligence and works for a company that utilizes AI. He argues that AI is not disruptive as it has existed for awhile and is a slow and steady process. The argument made by Chisti is that guests expect a service with real people rather than machines. Overall, there will be technological advancements but it will be slow and steady. It's just up to hoteliers on how quickly they want to implement it.

Proximity Marketing is the trend of the marketing sector of the hospitality industry. Based on the statistics, there is a great increase in using proximity marketing recent years. And there are some reasons why hotels choose to use this technology. First, it enables the hotel to reach potential customers and providing electronic forms of advertising. By notifying guests of exclusive promotions hotels have to offer through their mobile phones, hotels and advertisers have a greater chance of customers responding to their advertisements, and therefore a greater ROI on their marketing spend. Second, from the perspective of the hotel, it decrease the advertising cost in terms of decreasing labor cost. It is said that proximity marketing has a tremendous revenue-production potential, and more hotels are engaging in using proximity marketing.

Proximity marketing is the localized wireless distribution of advertising content associated with a particular place. It is now becoming one of the most popular marketing tools in any industry especially in hospitality. Marketing people from hotel industry were looking for new marketing tools past few years. Instead of sending out promotion mails or emails, they need to have better ideas. What they realized is that wish an increase in the use of mobile devices, hotels can communicate and provide better service with guest cell phone. They also realized guests usually watch TV, while they are waiting to be C/I. So hotel is now providing offers while guests are in line. It is a Win-Win situation. The way to find communication is now the key of marketing. Proximity Marketing is a type of eMarketing that will help to communicate with guests with low cost.

According to this article, it said that by the end of 2011, 91% of Americans  owned mobile phones, and Smartphone penetration have been doubled. Obviously, it becomes a trend in hospitality industry nowadays that more and more people use smart phones and tablets. Based on wireless such as bluetooth, it allows hoteliers to interact with customers much easier and more convenient. Proximity marketing is one kind of eMarketing which is very popular in daily life. It is well known that better marketing brings better sales which of course increases revenues of companies. By sending guests nearby informations about promotions and discounts, hotels attract more guests than before. However, too much informations sent to guests will make them sucks and they have no choice to select what they really want. So in my opinion, I think it should be improved.

inamo™ is like no other restaurant anywhere in the world. Located in central London inamo and inamo st james are pioneering Oriental fusion restaurants where the control of the dining experience is placed firmly in the customer's hands. At the core of inamo™ is its interactive ordering system, E-Table™. With an E-Table™ system, diners place orders from an illustrated food and drinks menu projected on to their table surface. Customers also set their table ambience, discover the local neighbourhood, and even order a taxi home. The Content Management System makes Restaurant management easy. All E-Table™ ambience and retail activity is conveniently connected to a central management system. It has been specially developed for E-Table™ and designed so anyone can intuitively control the management process. Features include: Easily update and edit Names, Images, and Descriptions of products. Create and modify food and drink menus. Instantly create paper menus and website copy direct from the Management System. Update images and patterns with direct upload from your computer to change the look and feel of the tables. Create new permanent and seasonal sets of images and patterns. Set up a private dining room. Create custom configurations and apply any combination of themes, menus, images and patterns, to groups of tables on the system. Change your menus according to the day of the week, season, time of the day, special events. Create and modify "where next" maps. Guests can see what they and their group have ordered at any time, call a waitress over to attend to them and request the bill when they are ready to go. A host of extra functions are available - guests can view a live video of the kitchen, order a taxi home, or see what's on at the local cinema.

As this article mentioned, modern hospitality industry has a new approach to reach their guests and build loyal relationship with them. It is clear that marketing continue to evolve in the future. The article introduces the concept of proximity marketing and benefits of it. In my opinion, this style of communication between hotel and guests will be more and more popular and spread over the world rapidly because of its high efficiency and convenient. It provides useful information to customers, and at the same time, company can save costs and create good brand image and build loyalty relationship with their guests.

As this article mentioned, HRIS mainly assists you to keep record, report and manage your data in a web-based solution. It introduces the advantages of HRIS, and makes suggestion for installing it in your companies. It is very convenient and easy to access data. It is very flexible for you to change them. In my opinion, it is very well to install in hospitality industry because it makes everything easy. It can help HR Department to manage their daily events, strategic planning and easier data searching. The biggest benefit is to save a lot of time for HR staff.

With the occurrence of new technologies, hotel and resort are constantly looking into running their operations more efficiently, reducing labor costs and enhancing guests' experience. According to the article Housekeeping communication gets more efficient, high-tech The Umstead Hotel and Spa has implemented tray detection technology from Axxess Industries that allows the staff at the hotel to track trays from room service that are passed by the entrance door of rooms giving a signal to the room service staff that they are located outside of the room now and needs to be picked up. Staff also is alerted when a room is available for cleaning. Guests click a button, which sets off another sensor, to indicate they are gone and the room can be cleaned. Another very beneficial technology is the REX system by M-Tech that works in conjunction with a property's PMS system using iPod touch technology. he iPod will show each house-keeper his or her list of rooms for that day, and once a guest checks out-or even leaves the room unoccupied-the housekeeper is notified a room is ready to be refreshed or turned over. Using the REX system allows hotels for more efficient communication between staff and helps tracking all the assigned rooms for the day that need to be serviced. There are many opportunities for hotels to cut enhance guest experience using technologies that allow for better tracking and communications between department resulting in the end of enhancing guest experience and even though hotels might be reluctant to the initial cost of implementation, I am strongly convinced that these solutions are the solutions for the future and will provide hotels with competitive advantage.

Laguna Beach welcomes more than 6 million visitors annually to its sandy shores. Now visitors who stay in the beachside city's 22 hotels and lodging establishments will be inadvertent participants in a citywide effort to recycle all of the soaps, shampoos, hair conditioners, lotions and bath gels that are left over after a night's stay. Starting Monday, Laguna Beach becomes the first city in the nation to have all of its hotel properties with more than 20 rooms participate in Clean the World -- a Florida-based nonprofit that provides recycled hotel soaps and hygiene products to those in need. Montage Laguna Beach, Pacific Edge Hotel and Best Western Laguna Brisas are among the 18 participating hotels, along with four of the city's six bed and breakfasts, for a total of 1,229 rooms. In an average year, with an estimated 75% occupancy rate, Laguna Beach hotels generate 336,000 bars of soap and a slightly lesser number of shampoo, conditioner, bath gel and lotion bottles, all of which were previously thrown in the trash. Working with Clean the World, those hygiene products will be reclaimed by the housekeeping staff and set aside in a separate receptacle to be shipped to a Las Vegas processing facility. The bars of soap are cleaned of hair and paper, sterilized, ground into pellets and pressed into new bars of soap that are distributed to non-governmental organizations in 45 countries that do not have ready access to soap. The bottled amenities are likewise reclaimed. If they're full, the bottles' exteriors are sterilized and redistributed to homeless shelters and soup kitchens inside the U.S. If the bottles are 25% empty, the plastic is recycled or potentially upcycled for use in other products. Founded in 2009, Clean the World has 1,200 partner hotels across the U.S. and Canada, 126 of which are in California, including the Disneyland Hotel, Disney's Grand Californian Resort & Spa and Disney's Paradise Pier Hotel in Anaheim. Since joining the Clean th

Twenty years ago marked the beginning of a new period in Royal Caribbean Cruises Limited (RCCL) and helping the environment. They proposed a Save the Waves program, which allows guests to choose when towels and linens are ready to be washed saving numerous amounts of water and energy as well as reducing, reusing, and recycling. Today, their green initiative goes even further, and as the arictle discusses RCCL is implementing a plan to improve their waste, power, and most importantly, their future. Protecting and conserving the environment is a priority this company is willing to stand for. They constantly plan their efforts to maintain environmental protection and to continue to be environmentally responsible.

The company Aptech Financial Solutions software has been recently chosen by eight different hotel companies. The software is back end accounting software which its investors believe to be the best in the business. The company has brought along over 120 plus new hotels in their recent acquirement including Summit Hotel Properties who has over 80 hotels. The company offers three different solutions to all your back end hospitality industry needs; Profitvue, Targetvue, and Execuvue.

Having a clear understand of what makes a great hotel, resort, or conference centre and how to run it profitably is an essential part for a successful management company. Benchmark Hospitality International win the market through its day-to-day management decisions on the numbers. They built a  centralized 'private cloud' technology hub and data gathering platform based on which the managers can make decisions every morning while not wait until month end or later to see property financials. The private cloud helps to reduce its ownership costs and to protect data. Benchmark also uses the Internet-enabled Profitvue enterprise back office system from Aptech Computer System to centralized property accounting.  This is technology plays an important part of hotel operations. The Profivue back office accounting system is internet-enabled, so a PC is the only back-office hardware. The same for the front office systems. It is a great saving for its owners. Since Profivue is flexible enough for Benchmark to have a standard chart of accounts and general ledger for all its properties, Benchmark can quickly integrate a new property into Benchmark's processes. It just bring financial team members from other properties, who are familiar with the system and chart and G/L. So a new property can be ran very quickly without the usual hardware and software installation and staff training. Another advantage of this system is that Benchmark's financial stockholders, management teams, and guests benefit a lot from it, so they always support these innovations, which can later stimulate the company's success. Applying new technology in operation management can help company win a larger market share and develop fast.

It appears that American Airline is about to remove itself from the tradition global distribution system and introduce its own distribution system. American Airlines is advocating for distribution companies to utilize AA direct connect which is a direct link into AA's host reservations system. Currently American Airlines fares are no longer available on Expedia or Orbitz sites. This is because no contractual agreement was reached for the distribution of AA products. Travel professionals are waiting to see the result of this bold move by American as this has great implication for the future of airline distribution systems. If American Airlines pulls away from the mainstream GDS, consumers and travel specialist alike will be faced with the inconvenience of going to a separate reservations system to compare fares. Although travel professionals are now urged to use direct connect on a trial basis, the general feeling is that eventually they will be charged to sell American Airline flights. To defend this move American Airline is only saying that direct connect will make it easier for them to tract ancillary fees like priority seating. It was noted in the article that Southwest Airline for the most part is a stand alone reservations system but they do not negotiate with the GDS companies to sell their flights. It is therefore quite evident that this move by American is really to reduce expenditure by eliminating the middle GDS companies while increasing revenue by charging travel partners for utilizing direct connect. American Airlines clearly wants to globally control their distribution system and maximize revenues. Contract renewal for both world span and sabre are due and the experts are waiting to see if American will renew with them. Sabre is owned by American Airlines so its a wait and see game to see how all this will be panned out. The real problem for the consumers and travel specialists are that if other airlines are to follow this move by American the tra

This article explains the distribution route American Airlines is taking to sell their flights. Due to not seeing eye to eye with the two most probably used websites for travel, Expedia and Orbitz, American has now taken their products away from both airline distribution sites. American suggest that all travel agencies and distribution companies begin using Direct Connect, which is a system for only American Airlines flights. If this would happen, travel agencies and companies will then begin having to pay for the system in order to sell Americans flights. At the moment you can still book flights through other distribution sites, but until when will that be? They already stopped Orbitz and Expedia, what's not to stop the others. The future of global distribution systems will be up in the air if all airlines choose to sell their own systems to be able to sell reservations. The only positive that was pointed out in this article was that if this system takes over, then more consumers will have to go back to using travel agents to secure the best reservations for flights and such.

With the contracts for major global systems, Worldspan and Sabre, being up for renewal in the near future, this article analyses the possible outcomes for airlines, and alternatives should they choose not to forgo continuing use of GDS

Being ahead of the curve in IT investment can assist in an increase in ADR's and occupancy percentages, which translates to revenue. Mobile technology can assist streamline the guests' check-in/check-out process and offer other amenities via mobile technology. Social media technology offers a plethora of information for marketing and revenue management purposes as well.

Online marketing consultant and social media strategist Ravish Kumar shares five necessities for hospitality industry succcess when marketing in the digital age on LinkedIn. Of particular note is that this article was created in 2015, and likewise mentions the very critical transition from the popularity of desktops/laptops to the rise mobile phones as a crucial element to current emarketing.

this article talks about the trends int he marketing that are happening now, or are about to happen in the near future. Author compares new trends to an air travel. Trends that already have a lot of people being into are about to start, and there are some that exist but more people need to accept it before they will become successful.  

This article looked at the views on IT investments of Hospitality Technology's Editorial Advisory Board. The Board represents a variety of hospitality industries. The article focused on areas of improvement, emerging technologies, IT priorities for 2012, "wish list" IT investments, and more. Among the areas for improvement, guest Wi-Fi and mobile apps, loss prevention technologies, and social media targeting older clientele topped the list. Older guests connecting to and understanding social media are a worry among many of the Board members as well as lack of standardized, secure payment methods. Many also mention that their current systems (POS in particular) tend to hold them back from implementing new IT technologies because they would not be compatible.  Most Board members listed having mobile devices that could be used for a variety of purposes on the guest end as well as on the business end would be top on their "wish list" for IT implementations. With almost everyone owning smartphones today, I think this would be the smartest and most effective IT implementation to invest in. Many customers and guests are looking for easy and accessible ways of navigating through the hotel and restaurant environments without extensive help from others. Since many people, especially the generation coming up, are more and more attached to their phones and tablets, mobile apps for nearly everything seems like the smart way to go.  Cloud-based servers were a close second in terms of what they wanted in invest in. Many of the Board members pinpointed technologies that have been around but are still new, especially in their respective areas, when speaking of useful emerging technologies. Mobile apps, tablet and 73456

this article gives a great overview of the steps leaders in the Hospitality industry are taking towards new technology. In this article members of the industry were interview regarding weaknesses in the current hospitality market as well as emerging trends that each believe is in rapid increase. Some of the answers give very interesting approach towards technology. Although, overall it seems that the number one emerging technology is the use of cloud-based/mobile-based services.

This article talks about the constantly evolving and upgrading technology requirements for the hotels. Since hotels are expanding, these technologies make it easier to operate from different geographical locations, and also enables decision making based on revenues, guest services, and other factors. So today, if you are a hotel with a PMS, then one should invest in the era of hotel ERP's and cloud based management solutions. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), is an excellent tool to increase performance, productivity, reducing operational expenses, etc. This will provide the operators with constant visibility to hotel operations with single database and can be accessed through all the departments. it could be a good investment tool as ERP allows for hotels to interact with single vendor, as there is a single solution for multiple operations, and the fixed costs become more manageable.

This article tells us about an alternative to PMS an ERP. The software for hospitality is upgrading and developing everyday, and the requirements for them became more differentiated, strict and variable. The Hospitality industry is spread all over the world so hotel properties are getting larger and need to be managed easily. The number of services offered in the industry is enormous as well so hotel owners need to have appropriate software for all those multiple tasks as maintenance, payroll, CRM, accounts payable, front office and so on. So ERP can be a good thing to invest in with its cloud based management solutions. What can it offer to us? - consistency and accuracy of information - simplified coordination between departments - easier goal settings - new infrastructure that can easier and faster solve problems - really cost effective