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Hotel Technology News: Panic Buttons Are Buzzing, The World’s First Space Hotel, Marriott’s New Platform
Featured Stories from Hotel Technology News
Solution Providers Shift Into High Gear to Meet Hotel Demand for Employee Safety Panic Buttons
One year has now passed since the American Hotel & Lodging Association (AHLA), along with more than 25 hotel brands representing more than 18,000 properties, pledged to to make hotel employee safety a priority by providing hotel employees across the U.S. with employee safety devices. This was part of a groundbreaking initiative called the 5-Star Promise.
The program requires that participating hotels deploy new standards to help enhance the safety and security of hotel workers, including the implementation of electronic safety buttons, by the end of next year. The program has also served to shine a light on the need for government organizations to put legislative measures in place.
Construction Begins on the World’s First Space Hotel, Scheduled to Open In 2025
Last month, Aerospace company Gateway Foundation announced plans to open the world’s first commercial space hotel by 2025. Construction on the new hotel, which will take up only part of the real estate in a space station the organization is setting out to build, is scheduled to begin today, right here on Earth. Once the terrestrial work is completed, the parts will be assembled in orbit with the help of robots and drones and specialized space construction machinery from Orbital Construction.
The space station will permanently orbit the Earth, according to the organization, with the capacity to accommodate 100 tourists per week. It will be called The Von Braun Station, after the German and American aerospace engineer Wernher von Braun. Gateway Foundation members chose the name because the station is based on von Braun’s designs of 60 years ago.
Why AI-Powered Hotel Revenue Management Is Taking The Hospitality Industry By Storm
Automation has become the driving force in the evolution of revenue management. Leveraging advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning, the best of today’s solutions make pricing decisions and rate updates automatically. This allows revenue managers to focus their time on tactics and strategy rather than spending it crunching data and punching numbers into spreadsheets. The speed and complexity of the pricing decisions, and financial outcomes they generally produce, are unmatched by the most seasoned revenue manager using the most advanced solutions on the market only a few years ago. Such has been the blindingly rapid pace of technology innovation.
The ability to integrate new sources of data has also played a key role in driving smarter pricing decisions. Advanced revenue management solutions leverage not only the repository of historic data that resides in a hotel’s property management system, but also, in many cases, a vast array of market intelligence and other data, from competitor rates data to booking trends data. This makes it possible to more accurately forecast demand, and, as a result, increase hotel revenue and profitability in unprecedented ways.
How Hoteliers Can Use Conversational Marketing To Beat the Competition
Much has been said and written about conversational marketing and how future marketers will be required to master this consumer engagement technique in order to be successful. Clearly, the hospitality industry is well-positioned to leverage the loyalty-building power of conversational marketing through personal engagement with its guests, pre-arrival, during guest stays and post-checkout. Let’s take a deep dive into how your property can use conversational marketing, beat the competition every time and capture more market share.
Business-2-Consumer (B2C) communications continue to evolve and spread globally. Today’s always-on generation expects near-instantaneous communications with businesses and long gone are the days where businesses require consumers to fill out an online email form only to receive a reply in 24-48 hours. Social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter continue to invest heavily in building out their consumer messaging platforms and capabilities.
Spotlight Interview: Todd Sabo, President, RMS North America
The President of RMS North America, Todd Sabo, is responsible for leading the company’s strategic vision in the Americas, including deployment of its cloud-based property management software, customer success, and growing market share. He recently shared with us his views on what sets the company apart as well as his perspective on technology-enabled business improvement in the hospitality industry. He also told us a bit about his own career trajectory.
For starters, let’s talk about the new RMS Prime solution, which just launched this month. What unmet need in the marketplace does this solution address? How does it work, what are the benefits, and who are your target customers?
RMS Prime has all of the power of RMS’ existing property management software in a cost-effective, simplified solution, which minimizes the hassle factor of converting your PMS to RMS Prime. RMS Prime is directly targeted to self-service, limited-service, and boutique hotels that will be able to take advantage of our innovative technology to simplify day-to-day operations, increase bookings and revenue, and improve the guest experience. RMS Prime provides a streamlined and accelerated onboarding and training process to help properties transition seamlessly from other property management systems to RMS. RMS Prime also offers a free annual rate evaluation and loading service to ensure clients are optimizing revenue and spending less time and hassle setting up rates themselves.
Hospitality Startup Hotelitix Aims to Shake Up Hospitality Industry with New, Affordable Revenue Management Software
In January of 2019, Andres Moreno, Roman Wunderlich and Carlos Rosa, sat down together to discuss a void in the hospitality industry they had been witnessing for years. They observed that existing revenue management software’s were not only becoming archaic, outdated and difficult to use, but were still unaffordable for most mid to small independent hotels.
With the hospitality industry becoming more and more competitive, with the rise of Airbnb and the budgets and technology advantages of the flagged hotels, the team set their sights on building technology giving a competitive edge back to independent hotels.
Thus, Hotelitix was born. Using modern data-analytics, machine learning, combined with decades of revenue management and software experience, Hotelitix is launching their software, marrying an intuitive, easy to manage interface, with industry-leading performance, all at an affordable price.
Instawork Expands Its On-Demand Hospitality Staffing App to East Coast Cities
On-demand staffing solution provider Instawork, the leading app for gig workers and hospitality businesses, announced today its expansion into east coast cities, starting with Boston, New York City, and Washington, D.C. Instawork’s vision is to create economic opportunity for local workers and hospitality businesses, globally. The gig marketplace enables hospitality professionals a way to find high paying work fast and helps businesses find quality workers.
Over the past several months, Instawork has announced $30 million in funding from top investors including Spark Capital, Benchmark, and Burst Capital and now operates in nine U.S. markets: the Bay Area, Boston, Chicago, Las Vegas, Greater Los Angeles, New York, Greater Phoenix, San Diego, and Washington, D.C.
Marriott Unveils Distribution Technology Platform For Its New Home Rental Offering
Largely in response to the growing competitive threat posed by Airbnb and other players in the home-sharing rental space, major hotel companies, including AccorHotels, Hilton and Hyatt (which invested in Oasis Collections), have been accelerating their expansion into the vacation rental industry game. This summer, Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts launched its Four Seasons Private Retreats, expanding its own rental portfolio, as well.
The world’s largest hotel company, Marriott International, whose brands include Ritz-Carlton, Sheraton W Hotels and Starwood, launched a pilot program last year in Europe allowing rental guests to accumulate and redeem loyalty points through its Bonvoy loyalty program in the same way that they would do at other Marriott properties and hotels.
Hotel Technology News, published by Starfleet Media, is the hospitality industry’s premier source of information and insights related to technology innovation at the world’s leading restaurants.