HTNG – Several Efforts Completed in 2014
Hotel Technology Next Generation (HTNG) has continued to grow its library of best practices, design guides, standards and other material to help hotels and vendors alike deal with the ever-increasing complexity of technology.  HTNG working groups held 236 meetings over the past year and produced dozens of deliverables for use by the industry, including design guides, best practices, standards, webinars and other documents. Nearly 1,000 industry experts from around the world collaborated in face-to-face meetings during the past year, sharing ideas and solutions in order to reduce the costs and challenges hotels and vendors face when trying to implement new technologies on their own.

Several efforts have been completed during the past year. HTNG volunteers developed extensive design guides for deploying fiber-optic networks in hotels. Another work group is currently finishing up work to vastly simplify the connection of guest mobile devices to hotel networks, which will ultimately allow known devices, such as those carried by members of a hotel frequency program, to connect automatically without the need to log in. Other groups completed work on a roadmap for migration to future Wi-Fi standards, as well as a set of guidelines for the deployment of digital television in hotels. They have also updated numerous existing HTNG standards to address new industry requirements in distribution, point of sale, customer profiling and guestroom device management, as well as foundational standards used to support all HTNG interface standards.

• A major initiative will address the many challenges hotels and vendors have discovered as they have begun moving on-premise applications into the cloud. 
• Another will create guidelines for architects and designers to clearly identify the technology requirements that need to be built into 21st century hotels. 
• A third group is exploring the need for lightweight messaging standards using JSON to support the proliferation of mobile applications. 
• Another is identifying the requirements to move PBX systems to the cloud – a significant cost-saving opportunity, but one that to date has primarily been workable only for limited-service hotels. 
• Yet another will create standards to support the use of virtual (single-use) credit cards in reservations.

HTNG also launched a new collaborative group consisting of chief information security officers from 17 global hotel groups, including all of the global top 10. This group, which first met face to face in May, is not only sharing solutions and best practices to improve security, but can also alert each other and share notes in real time when new threats surface. They plan to meet in person twice each year.

Nearly 1,000 members attended HTNG meetings around the world in the past year, many traveling from distant continents. HTNG continues to grow both in membership and is continuing its mission of solving problems and nurturing emerging technologies.