Business travel is picking back up and families may be taking their first or second real vacations since the pandemic cancelled so many plans just a few years ago. To ensure that guests have the best on-site experience possible, hoteliers are increasingly looking to new technologies to make their stay more comfortable than ever. With an advanced property management systems (PMS) and integration platforms, hoteliers can increase operational and staff efficiency, but also meet changing guest expectations for a high-value but relatively low-touch experience. We looked ahead to see what changes we expect to see sweeping the hospitality industry this year.

Payments may appear relatively straightforward for guests, but they can be excruciatingly complex for hotels. The reason for this is that the current payment facilitation landscape is highly distributed: When a guest purchases a room or an add-on and hits “pay,” their request must pass through a series of systems and vendors, including the payment gateway or processors, acquirers and payment service providers, and the various banks and payment methods themselves. The result of this dispersion of vendors is that payments can become needlessly complex for hotels (and their guests!), leading to wasted time, increased errors, and a more cumbersome guest experience. In this article, we’re going to look at ways that hotels can streamline payments, both for their guests and themselves, and in the process develop a secure payments system that can actually enhance revenue and amplify the guest experience. 

What a difference a year makes. After hotel occupancy peaked at 62.2 percent last January, the onset of COVID-19 led to seven months of consecutive drops, bottoming out at 24.5 percent in April before stabilizing around 48 percent in October. Hotels have largely remained in operation during this bumpy ride thanks in part to investments made in new technology such as contactless communications, data analytics, and automated systems. Hotels are increasingly embracing innovation like never before as they search for new ways to operate, shedding outdated strategies in favor of what works.

Embarrassing reports of lost data surfacing on the dark web are becoming more and more prevalent in the media. As hoteliers we become the custodians of our guests and customers’ data from the time acquired and utilized until that information is archived or permanently deleted. However, what happens when that chain of custody is broken? What happens to the employee data too? More importantly what plans do you as an owner have to prevent a disclosure from surfacing and damaging your reputation?