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The intention of this research is done to determine employee safety and security training and education for guests do helps to minimize the safety and security issues in the hospitality industry.

This is because everyone take their life as precious as gold. Unfortunately nowaday, hotels only used of the tecnology safety and security system to protect their guest.

Everyone is concerning about their safety and security when they are staying in the hotel during vacation.

the hotel industry has been hooked on placing more and more technology into guestrooms believing the guest wants it, needs it. It’s become a way to stay competitive.

Hotel owners started to question the cost and ROI. As operators, you became increasingly concerned over recurring support expenses

Oh, and one must not lose sight of the fact that there is the obsolescence factor with many of the items being superseded by new models at an ever-quickening pace

The ratio has been growing at an average pace of 20% year over year and continues at a steady climb

Americans don’t want to unplug from their portable communication devices when flying.

80 percent of respondents want the option to connect to the Internet during their flight.  An additional 66 percent would like to be allowed to talk on their cell phone. 

This is good news for airlines that already offer wireless services to their passengers.  However,

Cloud/SaaS can bring many advantages over on-premise solutions for hoteliers. Among them: Conversion of CapEx (capital expenditure) to OpEx (operational expenditure); Access to the latest version without the pain often associated with upgrades; Removal of the burden of application and infrastructure management; and Potential for heightened security beyond internal capabilities.

In addition, the cloud is being used by the federal government and financial institutions, both of which likely have stricter, more complicated regulatory requirements than most hotels.

1. Is it really cloud?

Corporate and leisure travel agencies can expect more technology to help them sell airline ancillaries after a global survey found high levels of support for this service through GDSs.

Agents understand that as the airline product continues to evolve and ancillaries form an increasingly significant role in the purchase decision and buying process, travel customers continue to look to agents to support them in purchasing itinerary solutions.

HeBS digital Blog Archive for the ‘Online Travel Agencies (OTAs)’ Category The OTA Billboard Effect or the Lazy Man’s Approach to Hotel DistributionMonday, August 1st, 2011 The following article is Max Starkov’s latest contribution to the “Successful eMarketing” blog on HOTELS magazine’s website The existence of the so-called billboard effect is not a new marketing phenomenon. It has existed long before the online channel became a reality. As confirmed by many studies, any marketing exposure by a hotel produces a billboard effect:  when you launch a banner advertising campaign; when you purchase a full-page ad in the New York Times travel section; when you launch a paid search campaign on Google, etc. The OTA Billboard Effect Lately Expedia reps have been aggressively using a new Cornell Hospitality Report, namely “Search, OTAs and Online Booking: An Expanded Analysis of the Billboard Effect” to convince hoteliers that they should use Expedia in order to generate more bookings from the hotel’s own website due to the so-called “Billboard Effect.” The Cornell Report, based on data from Expedia and InterContinental Hotel Group (IHG) from 2008-2010, is a continuation of a previous report on the subject, heavily supported by Expedia. The report’s analysis determined that when an IHG property was listed on the first results page of Expedia, this created an increase of between 7.5% and 14.1% in bookings for the same property on IHG’s own brand website. In other words, this is a confirmation for Expedia’s billboard effect, which hoteliers should take into consideration when griping against the 25% plus merchant OTA commission. when these “billboard effect bookings” are taken into consideration, Expedia’s commission “would effectively be reduced to single digits,” states the Cornell Report. Hoteliers, rejoice! We have found the perfect recipe for success: we do nothing as far as marketing the property website is concerned. Instead, we plaster Expedia with our sales promotions and wait for the travel consumers to come to our own website and book. As discussed, the billboard effect is not strictly an OTA territory. In my view, the Cornell Hospitality Report is a one-sided research project, very proactively supported by Expedia, similar to the first report on the billboard effect published in 2009. Cornell, the finest hospitality institution in the U.S., should know better than to come up with this half-baked “scientific” research, which does not account for the complexities of hotel distribution as well as the “digital information cloud” we all live in and the resulting marketing and distribution channel convergence which directly affects the purchasing habits of today’s hyper-interactive travel consumers. This report makes conclusions that do not take into account, among many other things, the following: Complex Travel Planning Patterns in Hospitality Many surveys show that people are shopping around on a number of hotel and travel websites before narrowing down their search. Typically in hospitality, these sites include a hotel search on a search engine e.g. Google (65% market share), an OTA website, TripAdvisor, the hotel’s own website, etc. Therefore jumping from an OTA website to a hotel branded website and vice versa is at least partially due to particular travel research patterns unique to the users and not due to the so-called billboard effect: Step 1: “I always search on Google first where I identify a property I like” Step 2: “I go to Expedia and see what the rate for this property is” Step 3: “I visit TripAdvisor to read my peer reviews for this hotel” Step 4: “I visit the hotel website and book if I like the location, rate and what I have read and seen about this hotel”

Imagine being able to welcome back a hotel guest by seamlessly sending a personalized message directly to their mobile phone when they arrive on site

Location based services such as proximity marketing (which uses Bluetooth and Wi-Fi to broadcast content only within proximity of the specified location) and geofencing (which allows a brand to set up a customizable virtual area that if crossed by opted-in consumers, pushes marketing messages to the consumers’ mobile device), can be effortlessly integrated into a hotel’s current mobile offerings and further capture customer information for existing customer relationship management systems or loyalty programs.

Leveraging customer data and insights gained across all touch points will become increasingly more important, especially as hotels and resorts begin to shift from their differentiation strategy toward competing on Average Daily Rate (ADR) cost

increase 8% last month, compared with April 2012

Global corporate bookings set a new growth record of +8.8% over prior year in April, according to Pegasus Solutions, the single largest processor of electronic hotel transactions

In 2008, Bank of America became one of the first organizations to test electronic badges that tracked and analyzed employee behavior. The experiment, in which call-center workers agreed to be followed electronically for a month, found that groups of employees who spent time together were more productive.

The tracking-badge technology used in the Bank of America tests, developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab

“Human social interaction is rapidly becoming more measurable at a large scale, thanks to always-on sensors like cellphones. The next challenge is to use what we learn from this behavioral data to influence or enhance how people work with each other,”

Energy cost is witnessing a sharp rise year-on-year in India. Like every other industry, the hotel industry is also deeply concerned and taking measures to introduce energy management solutions to keep energy cost under control.

:Like every business establishment, hotel properties also need to keep a check on all expenses so that they can minimize costs and maximize profits. In a hotel, the energy cost can be high enough to be the second highest expense and heating ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) can make up to 50% of the total energy consumption. So, this is where the hotel needs to look in order to minimize energy consumption which would ultimately help them reduce energy bills. In simple words, when a hotel is able to control energy costs, they actually add to their bottom line. 

the Energex system is based on passive infra-red technology. Once installed, the sensor in the solution detects the presence of the guest in the room as it captures the thermo radiation emitted by the human body. When our system determines that there is a guest in the room, it gives him/herfull control over the HVAC system. This means, they can set the temperature as per their requirements. But, once the guest steps out of the room, our smart sensor detects the room as unoccupied and automatically sets-back the temperature in the room to a preset energy efficient mode. The solution also has a quick recovery method where-in the temperature returns to that set by the guest When they return to the room and this ensures guest comfort. 

It could affect hiring if restaurants continue to be faced with additional costs and burdens to comply with government mandates and regulations,”

thanks to an IRS ruling, restaurants are being thrown into the debate — and are faced with a decision of their own: Should tipping for large parties be left solely to the customer or should the restaurant tack it on to the bill?

“When they spend $200 and leave $20, you’re losing out on about $16 or $17 When we already pay a tip out to a host, bartender and bussers. It really makes the income of a server go down.”

So a good starting point is to quantify how many calls are actually being handled on the front desk and more importantly how many are being lost due to under-staffing, poor training and/or non-existent technology.

What then are the guiding principles when establishing a successful reservations function?

Technology which supports – rather than prevents – sales may seem an obvious starter for 10 but the reality is that again most hotels are at best challenged by IT due to under-investment.

Although employers expect prospective hires to have a basic knowledge of standard office software programs and internet capabilities, they prefer to see a higher level of competency beyond the basics.

If a prospect is already well-versed in the necessary programs for the job, the costs to train new hires drops, as well.

Most hotel guests are accustomed to dealing with human members of staff. But robotics in hospitality are becoming more and more prevalent, aimed at improving guests’ experience

The hotel industry is well aware of this possibility, which is why the big brands are innovating like crazy to maintain an edge over smaller, more nimble lodging industry disruptors. By taking a proactive approach to new technology, brands are able to keep ahead of trends and implement solutions before guests even know what it is, exactly, that they’re looking for

So, how do these big hotel companies implement innovations that, by definition, are disruptive to existing processes, while still providing the best guest experience? It’s apparently a combination of deep research, careful preparation, and closely monitored pilot programs.

Credit card fraud and identity theft should remain high on the hotel and lodging industry’s radar. Just ask Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide (including their Westin, Sheraton and W Hotel brands), Hilton, Hyatt and the Trump Hotel Collection, all of which were victims of highly publicized, major breaches in the hospitality industry last year. 

Hotels need a ‘toolbelt’ of various security technologies that can be used to prevent malicious attacks. A managed firewall is essential, blocking dangerous traffic from coming onto the network and preventing sensitive data from being exfiltrated, or sent, to the hackers.

In the breaches mentioned above, point-of-sale (POS) systems were attacked and malware launched to acquire cardholder names, credit card numbers and expiration dates.