Tech Talk

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Definitely Doug 6/9/23: Hotels Fighting Trafficking: The Role of Technology
Posted: 06/09/2023

This week I want to address an important issue for the hospitality industry, albeit one that technologists have not historically had on their radar. They can potentially play a significant role in addressing the issue, which is human trafficking, and more specifically sex trafficking.

In my last column, I reviewed some key trends in autonomous mobile robotics for hotels, and dove into three categories of delivery robots in more detail – room delivery, food delivery, and heavy-lift robots. This week I will round out the topic with several other robot types and applications, as well as general guidance for evaluating, acquiring, and adopting mobile autonomous robotics. If you have not yet read part one, I recommend going back and doing so before continuing below, as some of the introductory material is important background to what follows.

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Best Practices for Hotel & Resort Operators in Pool Season 2023
Posted: 05/25/2023

With the arrival of warmer weather and summer fast approaching, hospitality operators are gearing up for another pool season. This year, technology is at the forefront of driving booking revenue and taking operational efficiency to the next level. Modern technology platforms (such as hospitality’s newest technology category – the Property Experience Management System or PXMS) are providing brand new capabilities that unlock new strategies and approaches to filling the pool with satisfied guests.

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The Growing Role Technology Plays in Hotels and Restaurants
Posted: 05/25/2023

In the past few years, hotels and restaurants have grown into hubs for entertainment, leisure, and human connection. In an effort to best serve their guests, operators have begun rethinking their technological investments and working to adapt to recent shifts in consumer preference and operations. To ensure that guests have the best on-site experience possible, brands are increasingly looking to new technologies to make their experiences more convenient and comfortable. Advanced property management systems (PMS) and point-of-sale (POS) systems can increase operational and staff efficiency, while also meeting changing customer expectations for a high-value but relatively low-touch experience.

This week I will return to a topic I have covered before, because it has, within the last 12 to 18 months, become one of the hottest-growth categories in hospitality technology. That topic is autonomous mobile robots – specifically, ones that can move around the facility as well as perform specific tasks. Many of these products were launched pre-Covid but were often seen at the time as more of a marketing gimmick than a legitimate operational solution.

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Proving the Negative

03/09/2015

by Michael Schubach

Remember George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign? Of course you do – Vice President Dick Vader was running the country from the White House basement while President Bush II was telling us how much safer we all were as a result of the government’s hard work. What was the self-evident evidence of our safety? We hadn’t had another September 11, so of course we were safer – what don’t you get?

Skeptics – and I promise you I wasn’t the only one – asked themselves how anyone could prove a negative, that is, how could anyone say with certainty that something didn’t happen as a result of their efforts and activities? It would have been just as valid for the government to claim that since September 11 the U.S. had introduced a rigorous program to halt total solar eclipses over North America. Is it working? The self-evident evidence: have you seen any total solar eclipses since then? The ipso facto conclusion you’d be forced to draw: our swell new total eclipse policy is alive, well and working as planned. And when would we know if the program were somehow flawed in some not-so-obvious way? To get that answer, you’d need to wait for the next total eclipse of the sun.

I can think of a different analogy that faces every hotel company in business today. Is your rigorous program to halt the prospect of data compromise working? Provided your system is thus-far unscathed, your self-evident evidence is that yes, your system safeguards are alive, well and working as planned. And when would you know if your safety steps were somehow flawed in some not-so-obvious way? To get that answer, you’ll need to wait for your turn in the system-breach barrel.

The latest occupant of the barrel is Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group. It’s too early to know what actually happened – let alone how, when, where or why – so this is not a rush to judgment. It’s really quite the opposite: I’ve been long acquainted with key members of the MOHG technical staff, and if anything, they have been overly protective of their data, their guests’ data, their guests’ privacy and the integrity of their systems and network. I think the negative that MOHG is about to prove is the sad reality that good security works right up until it doesn’t. Given adherence to established guidelines and best practices, you’ll find that you’re reasonably if not fully protected until the nanosecond that someone finds an unanticipated way in. That is the tremendous negative with which we all are forced to cope.

In the world of system security, there is no silver bullet; if there were, we wouldn’t be having huge, costly and embarrassing breaches… or even this conversation. Let me caveat that statement by noting that data can be more rigorously protected if you are willing to pay the price. With heightened security comes heightened complexity: making your data worthless to steal also makes it difficult (if not impossible) for your systems to consume or share. But supposing that you were willing to throw disproportionate funds at the problem, you, too, could operate a system every bit as secure as the one at the NSA.

Oops, bad example. I stand by my contention that there is no silver bullet, no unassailable secret maneuver that keeps your data absolutely safe and you absolutely comfortable. The typical problem isn’t some IT wonk asleep at the switch; you’re up against a 24x7x365 barrage by bad guys who intend to erode, circumvent or destroy whatever your good practices have built. Sadder yet, a breach could just as easily come from one of your own good guys who might open the wrong email or inadvertently share a file with the wrong flash drive. In one swift and fell swoop, a friend rather than a foe can usher chaos in through the gate that you’ve so meticulously built and guarded.

Odd truisms govern the world of system security. Do the wrong things and you’re likely to pay a heavy price; what you don’t know or don’t learn or don’t bother with could cost you the ranch. Do all the right things and… well, sometimes you end up in the same situation. That’s not an excuse for bypassing the time, effort and investment that good security demands – it’s just a reminder that sometimes bad things happen to good practices.

Best of luck to our friends at MOHG.

About The Author

Michael Schubach

Michael Schubach, CHTP+, CHAE+ is Chief Information Officer of Millennium Technology Group, the Information Technology subsidiary of Rosen Hotels & Resorts of Orlando, Florida. He is a member of the HFTP International Hospitality Hall of Fame, and frequent contributor to Hospitality Upgrade. He can be contacted at mschubach@mtg-fl.com.