Budgeting stands as a pivotal process for hoteliers, allowing them to strategically structure their operations, personnel, and resources to meet their forthcoming financial objectives. P&L benchmarking offers a valuable framework to facilitate accurate financial strategies by providing insights into financial performance relative to industry peers and empowering them to make data-driven decisions during the budgeting process. During the budget and forecast season, it is essential to consider various factors and follow best practices to ensure precise and realistic budgets.

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated, all too easily, that traditional hotel budgeting and forecasting can be quickly thrown out the window. As hoteliers continue to grapple with the unforeseen challenges facing the industry in 2021, M3 has tapped into its wealth of in-house hospitality experts to explore some key considerations to help operators react to and manage new forecasting challenges this year.

We are all pleased to see travel starting to rebound from the dark days of 2020. The welcome peak in demand from “Staycationers” across Europe and the US has brought high occupancy and room rates for many properties. Similarly, the backlog of weddings, anniversaries and belated birthday parties has helped kickstart the events-led side of the industry. 

As hotels gear up for the post-Covid hospitality boom, competition will be fierce. Those that can deliver the best and most personalized, most individualized guest experiences will undoubtedly win the race. And in today’s tech-driven world, implementing the right hotel tech stack will clearly be critical to success. 

Competing in today’s business environment is about meeting challenges, making decisions and innovating rapidly – using the best and most current technologies, tools and information. With more than 100 years of excellence in both information and communications technologies, NEC shares its views regarding trends and technologies that in 2014 will drive productivity and provide businesses with superior customer service, a more flexible work environment and a competitive edge.

Travelers are increasingly looking for – and expect – a more personalized experience from the hotels they visit, and they are increasingly looking at technology as a critical part of that experience. The survey, Creating the Coveted Hotel Guest Experience, reflects the thoughts of more than 2,700 U.S. and European travelers, as well as the perspective of hoteliers to gauge how well they align with consumers’ expectations.

Leverage your existing coax infrastructure for gigabit guestroom entertainment at a fraction of the cost of rewiring 

This white paper by SONIFI Solutions discusses how to deliver guest internet by leveraging existing coax technology within a hotel property for a cost-effective yet high performance experience.

Providing a seamless, secure and personalized guestroom TV experience that increases guest satisfaction and maximizes profits.

If 2020 pushed us in a single direction, it might have been to re-evaluate how we communicate and what all we touch. In this article, we explore the second revolution in hotel-guest communication and the seamless handoff of everything inside the hotel room to a guest’s personal device – including how that might happen and what that means for the guest.

Casting allows users to watch personal content or content from a strea;-1 provider like NetFlix or Amazon prime to larger size screens. People on the move like to stream their own content to a nearby TV set in a hotel room. This way one continues to enjoy a show or a film through popular content providers and in most cases, they are able to continue watching from where they left off in their homes.

SkyTouch Technology provides insights from our extensive research and experience working in the cloud. This white paper provides basic cloud computing definitions and characteristics, outlines benefits and challenges, and offers a decision-making checklist for hospitality executives to evaluate migrating their hotel management applications to the cloud.

Hospitality Upgrade partnered with HP to survey hospitality industry chief information officers (CIO) about their plans for IT investment, solution sourcing, and the strategic role of the CIO.

More than 9,000 millennials from around the world discussed their use of technology in hotels, restaurants, bars and coffee shops in a groundbreaking survey that quantifies the impact mobile devices are having on hospitality. This report highlights the ways in which hospitality operators need to adapt their services to meet the individual needs of millennials.

Hotels and the travelers who frequent them bear little resemblance to their counterparts from just a few years ago. The explosion of new technologies has allowed hotels to change the way they operate and has made the average traveler more tech-savvy and connected than ever.

Look inside any of the more than 20,000 restaurants that have been “powered by Maitre’D” : you’ll find it at the heart of every part of the operation. That’s Maitre’D on the floor and at the register. That’s Maitre’D driving window, online and counter orders. That’s Maitre’D making orders easier to read, prepare and expedite. That’s Maitre’D taking orders wirelessly and online. Handling gift and loyalty programs. Providing management tools on every mobile smartphone and device. And that’s Maitre’D in the back office, keeping track of every garnish and guest to ensure your profitability.

While raw data may be readily available through software generated reports, ultimately, it is the customer’s responsibility to pull the data out and attempt to reverse engineer the database. If this cannot be achieved, the data will be rendered useless – opportunity FAIL. Currently, there is a major gap in the POS industry that is derived from understanding and converting raw data into working data. SkyWire POS’s innovative build and technology directly addresses and closes this gap in the POS industry through its groundbreaking data transformation approach.

As life goes, challenges arise, and problem-solvers rise up to meet those challenges. This is the case for the Spa Industry’s experience with the Payment Card Industry (PCI) standards. While they are a set of vastly beneficial security practices in whole, they have presented the Spa Industry with a particular set of challenges that SkyWire Spa has sought to overcome. Given the service-orientated nature of the spa industry, Spas tend to experience a high number of no-shows for appointments and last-minute cancellations from their patrons. In the past, pre-PCI compliance era, Spas would have required their patrons to put a credit card down to hold their appointment. However, to maintain PCI compliancy, service providers can no longer store or hold unencrypted credit card information on site, thus removing any financial consequence to the patron if they do not keep their appointment. The removal has resulted in a direct loss of revenue for both the service provider and the therapist employees because it is difficult to fill last minute openings. To combat this issue, SkyWire Spa has employed a Payment Safe to take its clients out of scope, thus enabling their clients to provide a secure transaction process while reinstating a revenue stream from their cancellation and no-show appointment policies. In addition, SkyWire’s architectural credit card obfuscation design allows its clients to mitigate their risk from breaches of data at rest.

For this report ReviewPro analyzed 15,423,138 online reviews of 32,359 hotels representing 179 brands in the US and Canada. The data was drawn from 65 review sources over a one-year period from April 1, 2017 to March 31, 2018 and compares performance to the previous year, from April 1, 2016 to March 31, 2017.

As hotel communication evolves, some providers have become creative with packaging solutions that may not be what they seem. The result- hoteliers are destined for PBX Regret.

Businesses today communicate in more ways, using more technologies, than ever before. Calls are as likely to take place on mobile devices and computers as they are on desk phones, and communication methods now include not only traditional one-on-one voice calling, but also Internet calling; conferencing and collaboration; and messaging and instant messaging. As communications continue to evolve, so too will the number and complexity of devices and formats – along with the challenge of using them effectively and cost-efficiently.

It’s hard to believe that there was a world before smartphones and Wi-Fi. In reality, it was less than 20 years ago that Wi-Fi was first available in our homes and just over 10 years since the first iPhone came out. We have quickly become accustomed to the world at our fingertips.