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Security Innovations, Incorporated (SII) specializes in online and real-time access control systems for the lodging industry. SII provides security products that integrate standard electrical and building specifications.

Hotels are defined primarily by the services and amenities that they offer.

Full-Service

Limited-Service

Budget

Extended Stay

OTAs have had a major impact on how hotels are booked since their inception some twenty years ago

ADR = Room Revenue / Rooms Sold

RevPar = Occupancy Rate x ADR

The two core customer groups that fuel demand for hotel rooms are tourism and business travelers

Hotels also can benefit from locations adjacent to or near convention centers.

Demand drivers can change as a metro grows.

The hotel industry has seen substantial change both in terms of how hotels are developed and used as well as how they are marketed. Most changes in use are rooted in the adoption of technology.

Hotels have unique industry standard metrics to track performance and growth, which include average daily rates (ADR) and revenue per available room (RevPar)

illenials are driving changes in use of practically everything they touch and hotels are no exception. Through their desire for affordable yet “cool” hotels in urban locations, hotel brands have been rapidly evolving to deliver concepts that cater to their tastes

While some pundits argue that the Millenial hotel is a fad, it is nonetheless changing the industry landscape and bringing a new breed of hotel to a magnitude of urban destinations.

nother way in which technology is changing the use of hotels is by enabling guests to redefine the period of the traditional night stay.

These apps are yet another example of how technology can be used to generate efficiencies – in this case to fill intraday hotel vacancies that would otherwise go unused.

Anyone who has traveled for either business or pleasure can grasp the basic building blocks of a successful hotel investment, which include: product offering, service, location, and competitiveness.

It also doesn’t require an industry veteran to appreciate that investing in a five-star hotel doesn’t necessarily correlate to earning five-star returns.

The takeaway is that hotels across all categories and price points have their own market segments, competitive sets and corresponding metrics. The key is to conduct a comparative analysis amongst similar hotels in order to determine whether or not the subject asset stands to win greater than, equal to or less than its fair share of its market demand.

There are a variety of entry points into hospitality real estate investments with a host of strategies

Measurement is crucial for all marketing success.

Just like your digital marketing, email marketing must be geo-targeted.

Sending emails in the user’s time zone is the best solution.

Email marketing is about two things: targeted segmentation and a high standard for content.

Smart hotels and brands have moved away from the mass broadcasting of spammy emails, and are now focusing on personalized, permission-based email delivery; and they are seeing their revenues go up.

marketers who put the least amount of effort into email marketing will end up using one of my least favorite sentences in hotel marketing: “It does not work for us.”

The most important and very first step is to segment and define your audience.

The more you segment, the better the outcome of your email campaign is going to be. Just like in life, you cannot be all things to all people, all the time. Proper segmentation parts the clouds and makes it easier for you to answer the next crucial question: What are you going to say?

Boring and uninteresting content will fail, no matter what medium you’re using.

Remember, it’s not just the click that matters. Once you manage to get someone to click through, make sure you give them a reason to stay. Poorly executed content and context will tank your campaign every single time.

A golden rule for writing email marketing content: If you have nothing useful to say, then don’t  say anything at all. Every campaign needs to be created with the user in mind. It has to be your #1 priority to reward the people who signed up. They cared enough about what you do to share their email address with you. But this can change with one click at the bottom of your next email.

Email marketing is not about standing on a pulpit and filling inboxes with marketing fluff. You have to earn the privilege of having access to people’s inboxes. You can never send bad content that does not benefit your guests in some way

it enables the airline to have enhanced control over how the content appears on travel agency reservation systems to make sure they’re presenting their full-service products in the best way and not encouraging customers to shop by lowest price.

Air Canada

began using NDC Exchange, a platform that does the work on Air Canada’s behalf to transform data from its web services into a way that’s readable by sellers using any of the different versions of New Distribution Capability.

NDC Exchange was created by airfare filing clearinghouse ATPCO

and SITA,

the airline industry has heavy control of both organizations, which may help keep costs below what they would probably have to pay third-party distribution giants to do the same work.

The platform could become more valuable if it effectively enabled the cross-selling of ancillary services between airlines.

If the vision is mostly fulfilled, the NDC Exchange could take on a life of its own. It could become more than a mere data transformation tool that acts as an integration layer during a presumably temporary spike in updates to the New Distribution Capability standard.

“There is a nominal cost to use it for airlines and a nominal cost to use it for the sellers, but if the costs stay low and the system has low latency, then the value would be worthwhile,”

Wallis said, “My wish would be to put all of my partners in the NDC Exchange, though it would take more than a year to get there.

For this platform, SITA is taking on the role of providing the IT networking for messaging and data services to power the exchange, while ATPCO transforms the data.

The NDC Exchange runs on SITA’s cloud-based infrastructure and airlines use its 24/7 call-center support to handle any troubleshooting.

Amadeus’s Elena Avila, executive vice president, head of Americas, airlines, said, “Air Canada is a long-term partner that we’re thrilled to be working with both on the IT and the distribution side.

Amadeus Anytime Merchandising will equip Air Canada to address evolving industry initiatives, such as NDC.”

Sabre announced “a commitment to advance at an industry level” new technological and business practice methods with American Airlines and several key players in corporate travel

A Sabre spokesperson said in an interview, “Efforts like the one you highlighted [by ATPCO] are often focused only on offer creation, whereas Beyond NDC is focused on developing end-to-end solutions that let airlines retail, distribute and fulfill across the entire traveler journey.

Amadeus announced an NDC-X program that’s working with Qantas and American Airlines and with travel sellers like Flight Centre, Travix, American Express Global Business Travel, Carlson Wagonlit Travel, and BCD Travel.

The traditional masters of this task — Amadeus, Sabre, and Travelport — could choose to plug into it. But they might have to accept commercial terms that would be less lucrative than past arrangements.

Verteil Technologies, an Indian IT provider, will use the NDC Exchange to aggregate the New Distribution Capability content and then enable Indian travel agencies to issue standalone New Distribution Capability tickets.

Australia- and New Zealand-based corporate travel technology company Serko is plugging into NDC Exchange.

Other vendors launching on NDC Exchange include Airlines Reporting Corp., Innfinity and Atriis.

The more it interacts with the customers, the smarter it becomes, and the more useful its suggestions.

Smart Guest Rooms

More Data

Energy Conservation

Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality

Mobile Technologies

Energy Conservation

While that initial email goes out to everyone in the database, Sauceda said the tool gives the ability to segment guests and target information.

“We can click a box and send the email only to wine-lover guests. We can customize it,” Sauceda said.

Sauceda said hoteliers have many opportunities to install technology platforms that sometimes it can be difficult to keep up with them all. However, if a hotel is moving down the path of installing new technology, he said leaders need to really vet their partner vendors.

However, with more countries migrating to chip cards and EMV-compliant POS systems, attackers have shifted their focus to card-not-present fraud and are targeting industries where consumers are making their payments and reservations over the phone—such as hotel contact centers.

If guests aren’t convinced that the hotel is keeping their personal and financial data secure, they will take their business elsewhere. In order to protect their brand reputation and their business, hotels need to create a culture of security throughout their entire organization that focuses on protecting guests’ digital property in addition to their physical property. One of the best places to start is their contact center.

In an era of increasing cyberattacks, hotels can make themselves less of a target by adopting technology to ensure that payment card data and other personally identifiable information is kept secure and segregated from the contact center.

With such an approach, customers calling to make a reservation or order additional services discreetly type their card numbers into the telephone keypad, rather than reading them out loud to the agent on the phone line. The data is securely routed to the payment gateway or a more secure server so it is never shared with the agent and is not held in the contact center infrastructure. This ensures that there is no possible spillover of the data to the unsecured or unmonitored areas of the business. It also reduces the number of individuals with access to the sensitive data, and makes the hotel contact center a less attractive target for cybercriminals. As an added benefit, this approach makes it easier for the hotel to comply with Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards by reducing the scope of compliance. By keeping payment card data out of the contact center, hotels can significantly reduce the high costs and extensive time associated with maintaining PCI DSS compliance.  

With stronger security practices for handling guests’ sensitive data, the hotel industry as a whole can transform itself from being one of the most likely targets for data breaches to becoming a model for data security, thereby ensuring that fewer customers ever have to go through the experience

Guests can sleep peacefully knowing that their data is secure, and the hotel can rest assured that its name won’t be making headlines as victim of a costly data breach.

Companies have uploaded VPN and cloud access credentials to cloud storage systems that are easily accessible.

security breaches are routinely made worse when hackers who enter one system are then finding the keys to another lying around unencrypted.

developers are still regularly storing the digital keys to company assets and even user data in source code, configuration files, and other miscellaneous, unencrypted locations.

Unlike typical users who can memorize their passwords or store them with a secure password manager, developers and IT workers often need to keep security credentials in places where automated software can find them.

Cloud managers are playing catchup to close the door on the critical data left out in the open.

Sophisticated new cybersecurity tools designed to securely store these kinds of credentials in a way that legitimate, automated processes can access, and intruders can’t

hackers time and again have outwitted the cyberguardians.

cloud industry leader Amazon launched AWS Secrets Manager, its own credential management tool. And Microsoft offers what it calls Azure Key Vault to securely store and monitor and control access to this kind of data.

The main problem is that companies really don’t have policies for it or they don’t follow up and make sure those policies are followed

Until recent hacks made it clear that few organizations can hope to keep their networks entirely free from intrusion, many companies paid less attention to the security of data within their firewalls

UpGuard, known for its frequent role in detecting leaks tied to data stored on insecure cloud machines, has released BreachSight, which scours the internet for its clients’ exposed code, credentials, personally identifiable information, and other sensitive data.

Since last year, Amazon has also offered a service called Amazon Macie, which uses machine learning to detect unusual access patterns to cloud storage and uploads of potentially sensitive data like access keys.

Amazon also released open source software to help prevent accidentally storing passwords and keys to source code repositories

other developers have offered similar tools to scrub credentials from existing code.

it’s possible that those types of tools will automatically be provided as part of cloud computing contracts, as standard as seatbelts in new cars.

However, there has been steady growth in the demand for Self Order Kiosks in the Fast Casual, Restaurant and Fast Food industries.  These days businesses are much more aware of the benefits of technology.  There is a lot of proven data that the right technology can boost the growth and productivity of a business.  Restaurants that are able leverage the latest technology trends can often have the largest technological advantage in the market. 

The Restaurant and Fast Food industry has changed a lot in the last 10 years and the competition and ability to differentiate has become increasingly more difficult.  We’re seeing a lot of overcrowding in many spaces.  Much like Retail stores casual dining restaurants are experiencing similar store closings due to overcrowding.

As time changes so do the generations of adults.  This means as baby boomers get older the next generation of people will be the majority of customers.  These days it’s not hard to see that almost every brand is looking to cater to the next generation of consumers.  It’s also no secret that the millennial generation and every generation after is much more technology aware and savvy.

Lower Overhead Improve Customer Experience and Retention Improve Efficiency Improve Growth Increase Revenue

Self Order Kiosk orders are typically submitted more accurately because there is no translation required from customer to cashier. It’s been proven that customers are happier with order consistency when entering orders on their own.  Happy customers often translate into repeat customers.

elf Order Kiosks can consistently provide better upselling and suggestive selling.  The more advanced kiosk technologies can provide upsells and suggestions based on the user that is ordering.

Kiosks can free up valuable human resources to do what humans do better than any kiosk could: greeting customers, offering assistance, bringing their food to the table, offering suggestions, and asking about their experience.

Many millennial customers will often choose a Self Service Kiosk option and if the kiosk is designed well, they will have a good ordering experience because the order entry was fast and easy.  A good kiosk interface can allow the customer to expect an accurate order every time.

Self Order Kiosks sound great! So then why has adoption been so poor?

Fragmentation Most of the Self Order Kiosks that are available today are not made for your Point of Sale system.  So there isn’t always a kiosk solution available.

Limited Customization Most Self Order Kiosks can be customized but the customization is often limited.  The ability to change the workflow, menu layout, and user experience tend to be limited.  These kiosks often have a standardized layout.  Most Self Order Kiosks do not allow you to change the orientation of the screen from portrait to landscape or vice versa.

Cost Self Order Kiosks definitely come with initial and on-going costs.  As with all things you get what you pay for.  The lower cost kiosks provide limited flexibility and may do a poor job of representing your brand.  The cheaper kiosk hardware is often not commercial grade and not nearly as rugged/tamper resistant as higher end options.  Cheaper solutions may be cost less up front but it limits your capabilities and the type of self service you’re offering your customers.

The high end kiosks built with custom enclosures and hardware are much more expensive.  However they can deliver the true branded experience.  As with all custom built equipment, it always has a higher initial cost and often come with a higher installation and setup cost. High end kiosk software is often custom developed.

Management Kiosks like all technologies, require management.  Maintenance, repairs, upgrades, security, and upkeep can increase the overhead of owning and operating Self Order Kiosks. Another issue that can arise from Kiosks is vandalism and this issue can add costs to manageability.

Poor Customer Experience Customers may become impatient or frustrated if the kiosks are not working, are laggy, or the interface is too complex to order or pay.  When something goes wrong customers may have to ask for assistance which can take up additional time.

Employee Sabotage Employees can see Kiosks as a threat to their job security and can make the experience difficult to adopt.  Sometimes Servers may believe that they are getting smaller tips because the customers are using self service kiosks.

A human resources management system ensures that your company has all the important information so that you hire people with all the requisite skills and compensate them according to current industry standards. Additional results of a job analysis include the creation of staff recruitment plans, advertisement of positions, and performance development planning.

Individual employee and dependent contributions are calculated and presented by the system with no additional time investment on the part of HR or benefits administrators.

Larger organizations have been making the digital transition over the past few years and it’s now becoming a standard for every organization, regardless of size.

ACA Compliance Features and Reports

An HRIS system contains considerable amounts of employee and plan data, all of which can be retrieved in the form of reports. 

From central operations such as boilers to lighting systems, kitchen equipment, and automated energy management systems, hotels globally are working to reduce energy use while sustaining

Efforts include the linen and towel reuse programs that are now an industry standard to installation of low-flow faucets, showerheads, and other fixtures.

Many hotels are making a statement by offering guests custom formulated amenities.

Many hotel companies are shifting to card options made from paper, wood, and bioplastic that are better for the environment but equally as durable.

Recognizing the importance of safer products for guests and employees as well as the natural environment, many hotels have shifted to cleaning products that are made with bio-based oils and other natural cleaners.

A shift to more sustainable and healthier cuisine offers travelers unique opportunities to experience a greater connection to the locations they are visiting in a more sustainable way

Hotels and resorts are integrating more and more selections in menus of all types that integrate organic produce, hormone free meats and dairy, and other natural products that offer guests healthier food selections.

A growing trend with all types of spas is the integration of treatments that feature local and indigenous ingredients as well as natural and organic products.

A data centre is a facility used to house computer systems and their components, and it can be far and away the biggest contributor to an organisation’s carbon footprint. A data centre’s life expectancy is relatively long so it is imperative it is built to the highest standards in terms of efficiency as any excess energy use will lead to significant cost implications over the years.

1. Build the most energy-efficient data centre possible. This will save energy and costs over its lifespan. 2. Only get the data storage capacity that is currently required and forecast for the lifespan. Many data centres have excess capacity that burns energy (and therefore costs) unnecessarily. Don’t have servers or equipment that will not be used. 3. Cooling data centres. Traditionally cooling has been done by air circulation, which is very inefficient. Larger data centres already use other technologies to cool more efficiently, such as water cooling. 4. Virtualisation technology. Improve your system’s resource utilisation through virtualisation technology. Virtualisation is the creation of a virtual (rather than actual) version of something, such as an operating system, server, network, etc. and allows a single user to access several physical devices on one terminal. A computing device dedicated to an individual member of staff or allocated for one software application is highly inefficient and expensive. Virtualisation consolidates resources, requiring less power and cooling. 5. Consider cloud computing. This is a location-independent IT service, typically available over the internet, where shared servers provide resources, software and data to computers and other devices on demand, increasing IT capacity and capabilities without an organisation having to invest in new infrastructure. Keeping data virtually, or “in the clouds”, means less information stored on IT systems and therefore less energy being used to run the systems. Systems such as BT’s Virtual Data Centre, a hosted data centre that enables businesses to create, deploy, monitor and manage their own service through a self-service portal, claim to offer savings of up to 40% of the total cost of running one’s own data centre as well as reducing the space required, the level of emissions produced and the power consumed.

6. Measure and monitor power usage. Once you know what’s using the power, focus on why and whether it’s possible to reduce consumption.

1. Upgrade. Before buying new, investigate options to upgrade with the latest energy-efficient components to extend appliances’ working life and efficiency. 2. Green labels. Look out for the certification labels denoting more energy-efficient equipment, from Blue Angel in Germany to TCO in Sweden and Energy Star in the US (see below). 3. Screens. Opt for flat screen monitors, which reduce energy use by over two-thirds. 4. Get the right equipment. Consider your information technology needs against the tasks required. For example, laptops may be a better option in some circumstances because they have been developed to be energy-efficient and generally match the computer to the task required. Remember: not all staff have the same needs. 5. Consider running costs. Look at the life cycle costs, not just the purchase cost. Take note of running and standby costs of equipment. These can vary enormously.

Top 10 Tips to reduce running costs of office equipment (source: Carbon Trust) 1. Computers. Activate energy-saving features. In fact, most office equipment will have these features, so make sure they’re activated. 2. Standby features. Introduce a policy to activate standby features, don’t assume employees will do it. 3. Turn it off. Buy seven-day timers. These can save up to 70% on energy costs. 4. Monitor and manage the equipment that is peripheral to computers, such as speakers, printers, etc. and consider installing intelligent switch-off solutions. Printers can consume 30%-40% of their peak power demand when idling between printing and standby modes, so minimising this can produce cost savings, reduce heat output and increase its operating life. 5. Educate your staff. Consider a screen saver with an energy-saving message. 6. Rationalise your equipment via networking to reduce the number of printers (for example) in any office area. 7. Printers Use only black and white for internal documents and colour only when absolutely necessary. Consider the benefits of inkjet printers v laser printers. Inkjet energy use is much lower than that of a laser printer. Encourage staff to use print preview functions. Set default printing mode to double-sided. Use lower-specification printers, such as inkjets, for internal documents and encourage staff to use these for day-to-day use.

8. Photocopiers High volume copiers use more energy so should be used sparingly. Use low melting point inks (available from stationery suppliers). Encourage staff to copy in batches to increase standby time. Stick to black and white copiers and only use colour when absolutely necessary. Set default copying to double-sided. 9. Invest to save and purchase only what you need. 10. Don’t forget to motivate staff. Keep repeating the message of the importance of energy saving in ways that they can understand (for example, a computer monitor switched off overnight saves enough energy to microwave six dinners).

WEEE (Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment), or e-waste, is the term used for old or disposed electronic equipment. It covers both the toxic and valuable materials found in appliances. The most important lesson is to reuse, not recycle. With so much e-waste, and electrical devices such as computers and flat screens often being replaced well before the end of their shelf life and ending up in landfill, it’s imperative that the most is made of these materials by reusing them productively.

Options to investigate when trying to reduce e-waste are: 1. Can you upgrade your equipment with new energy efficient components? 2. Can it be used by someone else in the company? 3. Can it be given to a charity? (Note: charities must be registered to take WEEE.) 4. Will the manufacturer take back the old equipment and reuse parts in new products?

Developments on the horizon include: 1. Smaller, more efficient processors. The continuing development of microprocessors means a mobile phone can have around the same computational power as the average desktop computer back in 2000. 2. Memristors. Electronics giant HP is in the process of developing “memristors” (see photo above), which have greater memory storage capacity while requiring less energy and space. They are due to be on the shelf in about three years. 3. Specialist data centre design. Siemens recently launched its transformational Data Centre Solution, a groundbreaking strategy in data centre energy-efficient design and operation. It claims the system, which uses virtualization and efficient power and cooling, offers many benefits for businesses, including up to 50% energy savings through ground water cooling and IT costs reduced by 30%. 4. Outsourcing. Hotels of all sizes are starting to view IT outsourcing as a viable option to gain flexibility and reduce short-term costs and increase transparency of cost structures and processes. 5. Optimisation of resources. This will become a necessity either through virtualisation, networking or cloud computing. 6. Water cooling. IBM is currently working on a supercomputer that is cooled by water (a given volume of water can hold 4,000 times more waste than air), which claims to be 50% more energy efficient than the world’s leading systems. The Aquasar stacks many computer processors on top of each other with cooling water flowing between each one. IBM’s Dr Bruno Michel told the BBC in November 2010: “We plan that 10 to 15 years from now, we can collapse such a system into one sugar cube — we’re going to have a supercomputer in a sugar cube.”