EVENTS

HIGHLIGHTS

MICHAL CHRISTINE ESCOBAR, SENIOR EDITOR – HOTELS More than 300 hotel IT executives came together Dec. 14-16 at the Fairmont Princess Scottsdale to network, listen to educational sessions and have some fun!

Scan here for in-depth coverage of all the sessions at HT-NEXT 2021! During HT-NEXT 2021, more than 300 IT executives came together to network, listen to educational sessions and have fun at the Fairmont Princess Scottsdale. The three-day event allowed many industry peers to connect with each other for the first time since HT-NEXT was last held in person in April 2019. Here are just a few highlights of some of the key sessions that took place during HT-NEXT 2021.

DAY 1 The Rise of Experiential IoT

Day 1 began with a highly anticipated presentation by John Padgett, President of Princess Cruises and Chief Experience and Innovation Officer at Carnival Corp. He provided a deep dive into why Carnival Corp., specifically its Princess Cruises brand, decided to implement a brand-new set of technologies to completely redefine the guest experience aboard their ships.

During his presentation, Padgett explained in detail not only how its OceanMedallion technology works but also the company’s thought process behind its creation.

“Our cruise ship is a 160,000-ton mobile device,” Padgett explained. “We wrapped it with an operating system, and every single guest experience that exists on that ship is simply an application on that mobile device. Everything sits on a ubiquitous platform. This is completely different from anything that exists now in the hospitality industry because hospitality companies — for the most part — employ a variety of systems that exist in their own verticals and are not built around the guest experience.”

This shift in mindset, however, allows Princess Cruises to deliver true personalization and frictionless experiences which in turn encourages guest loyalty and larger spend. In fact, Princess has even gone so far as to add their xIoT to beaches, shuttle buses, and other on-shore spaces where their guests may go to ensure the frictionless experience continues with them wherever they travel.

“Remember,” Padgett admonished attendees, “there is no limit to the amount of information people will share with you as long as you make the experience worth it. You need to provide them with value.”

Cryptocurrency & Hospitality

As cryptocurrencies gain popularity, hoteliers have been wondering what this means for the hotel industry. To get the conversation going, HT brought on stage a panel of experts to discuss this topic including: Bo Friddell, President of Sunrise Salvador; Craig Nazzaro, Partner, Nelson Mullins; David Khalif, Head of Operations, Viridi Funds and Ron Tarro, Managing Director, SalientVoice Ventures.

To begin, Friddell explained why his hotel in El Salvador accepts Bitcoin.

“When someone pays me in bitcoin, I can see

John Padgett, President of Princess Cruises and Chief Experience and Innovation Officer at Carnival Corp., kicked off HT-NEXT. Our cryptocurrency experts discussed how Bitcoin and other currencies could become mainstream in the near future.

all of the transactions from his wallet. I can see if a customer is brand new to our hotel and brand. I can also see if they’ve stopped using our brand and have begun using our competitor’s brand. This gives me the ability to then market to that customer aggressively to try and win back their loyalty,” he explained.

Plus, most guests who prefer to pay with Bitcoin also tend to spend significantly more on property, he added.

But can this form of payment work for hoteliers here in the U.S.? According to Nazzaro, the answer is complicated.

“To do what Bo is doing in El Salvador in the U.S. is possible and already being done,” he explained, “But the regulatory burden on the hospitality industry is quite large.”

For example, regulators in the U.S. view cryptocurrencies in a myriad of different ways. The IRS views it as a property and taxes it as such, the SEC as a security, and the CFTC as a commodity. This can make it extremely difficult for companies in the U.S. to want to do business in cryptocurrency. Plus, there are some strict regulations that vary state to state in how companies can pay employees in cryptocurrency. In many states, companies are not allowed to pay more than 25 percent of a staff member’s wages in cryptocurrency. And in many other states, you can’t pay a staff’s wages in cryptocurrency at all, Nazzaro added.

Cybersecurity: A Franchise Differentiator

During an fireside chat, Jason Stead, Senior Vice President, Chief Information Security Officer for Choice Hotels International sat down with Patrick Dunphy, VP, Technology & Information Management at AHLA to discuss cybersecurity issues facing Choice Hotels and the hospitality industry as a whole.

“The hospitality industry is being attacked at an alarming rate, and it’s only accelerating,” Stead explained.

According to Stead, there are a few key ways that hotel brands are becoming compromised. The first is email phishing scams that contain malicious attachments or links.

“Just last week we saw a brand new version of this, where hackers are actually breaking into a vendor’s email system, finding an email chain to a hotel that discusses payment for some service or product, and sending a follow up email that contains some type of fake invoice or a malicious link to compromise the hotel’s systems,” Stead explained.

Internet facing remote desktops that are not protected via a firewall and companies that rely too heavily on VPNs – many of which have major flaws – are two more ways that companies can easily become compromised.

“A lack of multifactor authentication is another major issue facing many brands today,” Stead added. “If you aren’t using that across the board today, you need to start now. Once we added MFA, we were able to solve a lot of security problems within our organization.”

ForWard @ HT-NEXT: Women at the Top

The last session of Day 1 was a hit with attendees who listened to four hotel tech executives discuss how they’re working to improve diversity and encourage females in hotel technology within their own organizations.

Dayna Kully, Co-Founder, 5thGenWireless, moderated this panel and asked panelists how the industry can encourage more women to choose the

Deborah Gilboa, MD, kicked off the second day of HT-NEXT by discussing work stress and how to retain employees. Attendees learned how some hotel tech industry executives are helping promote divirsity within their companies.

hospitality technology industry as a career.

Kathy Hatala, Director of Sales, Blueprint RF, discussed the importance of doing outreach to females attending colleges nearby and creating mentoring programs with these students. Benefits to this approach include: mentees often have jobs waiting for them as soon as they graduate, and executives are kept up to date on the most innovative technologies within their industry.

Page Petry, Principle, PD Petry Consulting, added that there is a need to educate young females on hotel technology careers even before they get to college, aiming to connect with students when they’re in high school.

Kully then turned the conversation to the recruitment process itself, asking her panelists how hoteliers can recruit a more diverse group for IT careers.

Jeff Bzdawka, CEO, Knowland shared a very real problem his company just recently faced.

“Since joining the company as CEO a few months ago, we’ve hired 12 new people, but not a single female applied for any of our open positions. ... It really has made us look at how we’re recruiting applicants to ensure we get a more diverse group,” Bzdawka said.

When Bzdawka took a look at their own recruiting firm, he found that it was a 100 percent white male firm.

“That’s a problem,” he noted. “Since discovering that, we added a female-led recruiting firm because we believe our recruiting partners need to have the same values as us.”

DAY 2 The Prescription for Recruitment, Retention and Recovery

Day two of HT-NEXT opened with Deborah Gilboa, MD, talking with attendees about the persistent and painful stressors facing the hospitality industry and how employers can retain staff members.

Gilboa noted that the reason why people stay at their job — even if the job isn’t the best fit, doesn’t pay the most money, etc. — is because of the people they work with and the people they work for. So, if employers want to retain staff they need to create excellent relationships between managers and staff.

To help attendees do this, Gilboa provided some important strategies for managers to follow.

First, ask employees “How are you?” and then take the time to really listen to their response.

Second, learn how to properly respond when a team member expresses their honest opinion: express gratitude, use empathy and find a way to tie your response to the company’s mission.

To tie it all together, Gilboa recommended a response along the lines of: ‘Thank you for telling me how you’re feeling. You’re struggling and I can see that. Remember, our mission as a company is X, so let’s brainstorm ways we can accomplish our mission while solving this problem.’

IT Leadership Panel: Tech Initiatives That Drive Revenue

Gilboa was immediately followed by the IT Leadership Panel, a perpetual favorite of HT-NEXT attendees. This year’s panel featured Dan Kornick, CIO, Loews Hotels & Co.; Brent Haines, VP of IT Product Development and Services, G6 Hospitality and Ramki Srinivasan, CDO and SVP Digital, IT and Contact Centers, Great Wolf Resorts, and was moderated by Robert Firpo-Cappiello, Editor-inChief of Hospitality Technology magazine.

Some key pieces of information to come from their discussion included:

Srinivasan noting that at one point Great Wolf Resorts was short 2000 employees. To help engage

A perpetual hit with attendees, the IT Leadership Panel offered attendees key insights into how Great Wolf Resorts, Loews Hotels & Co. and G6 Hospitality are using tech to benefit their brands. Attendees packed the room to hear how they can use their technology expertise to help organizations like ECPAT-USA and the FBI stop human trafficking.

with and hire staff, the brand allows prospective staff members to apply for jobs via text messaging.

“Our workforce is made up of younger kids for the most part,” he explained. “We need to be where they’re at. They don’t have time to fill out an application on a computer so we made it easy for them. Plus, all of our training is digital and online for this same reason.”

Kornick revealing that Loews Hotels moved all of its on-property systems to the cloud approximately two years ago and shut down its data centers.

“We used to not update our systems for years,” he said. “Now we do it monthly and sometimes even weekly. That has been really important to us because it allows us to focus on driving the guest experience and revenue.”

In the future, Loews is focused on how it can harvest guest data from siloed systems and then bring that data together in meaningful ways.

Haines discussing the importance of the user interface not just for guest-facing applications but for applications being used by owner operators. For example, the company implemented a new RMS approximately five years ago but only 40 percent of owner operators were using the system to its full potential. After feedback revealed that owner operators didn’t find the RMS to be user friendly, G6 Hospitality redesigned it.

“We went from a worksheet view to a calendar view and created some templates and simplified the workflow to be more of a guided process which allowed our owner operators to leverage some more of the complex capabilities of the system. Within 45 days of the new user interface rolling out, our adoption rate of the RMS went up to 80 percent. We consider that a real success story.”

How Can Technology Stop Traffickers?

with an amazing group of panelists brought together to discuss how technology could be used to help stop human trafficking from happening within hotels.

Larry Birnbaum, Principal Consultant, Xenios Group, moderated the discussion with panelists Robyn Conlon, Partner, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Lori Cohen, Chief Executive Officer, ECPAT-USA and Rosemarie Vesci, FBI Supervisory Special Agent, U.S. Government.

Birnbaum then asked the panelists what they thought hotel technologists could do to prevent trafficking from happening on their properties.

Conlon discussed the need for hoteliers to develop a risk assessment for each of their properties. Hoteliers can use external data sources such as social media layered with internal data sets such as the CRS, training, observations, guest Medallia systems, etc. to paint a profile of each hotel property and discover which properties are likely to be at higher risk for human trafficking.

“For example, do you have hotel properties that are close to an airport, have easy access to a highway, have high turnover in property managers, have a large amount of staff that haven’t been trained on the signs of trafficking, etc.,” she explained.

Vesci added that the need for accurate and detailed records is critical for the FBI to bring these cases to trial and get traffickers incarcerated.

“Traffickers might make the reservation under one name but check-in under another. Or they use a trafficked person to reserve the hotel room. The FBI needs phone numbers, copies of driver’s licenses, and more to ensure we can prosecute the right person,” Vesci explained.

She also begged attendees to improve video camera footage in hotel lobbies, hallways, elevators and more.

Day 3 of HT-NEXT began with AHLA CEO Chip Rogers moderating a panel of CEOs from Apple Hospitality, REIT, Best Western Hotels & Resorts and Choice Hotels International. Jason Stead, SVP, CISO for Choice Hotels International spoke with Patrick Dunphy, VP, Technology & Information Management, AHLA on cybersecurity issues facing his brand and the hospitality industry as a whole.

“I can’t tell you how often hoteliers are using low-quality cameras which prevents us from being able to identify perpetrators or their victims,” she noted.

Cohen also asked technologists to look into transactional details as a way to signal red flags to hotel staff. For instance, is someone reserving multiple rooms next to each other and also requesting that they be on the ground floor or next to a stairwell? Are they paying cash for the rooms? Do they refuse housekeeping but are constantly requesting new linens and towels? Are they asking for a lot of additional key cards? All of these details, especially when combined together, could indicate something nefarious is happening in those rooms. If technologists are able to create a system that could keep tabs on these types of details and then report it to hotel staff or management, this could be extremely helpful.

HT-NEXT Awards: Hotel Visionaries + TechOvation Live Competition

Day 2 ended with HT-NEXT’s ever-popular awards ceremony! To read about the TechOvation Competition and who won, head over to page 5. Hospitality Technology also used this time to announce the winners of its 2021 Hotel Visionary Awards: Choice Hotels International won in the Enterprise Innovator category while Loews Hotels & Co. won in the Customer-Facing Innovator category.

DAY 3 Real-Time CEO Perspectives

The final day of HT-NEXT kicked off with an amazing panel of hotel CEOs from Apple Hospitality, REIT, Best Western Hotels & Resorts and Choice Hotels International. The panel was moderated by Chip Rogers, CEO of AHLA. Rogers talked with panelists on a variety of topics, from guest loyalty to their predictions for 2022. Staffing and labor shortages yielded some thoughtprovoking comments from the panelists.

Pat Pacious, CEO, Choice Hotels International, began with the question that is on everyone’s mind: “Where are the workers?” According to Pacious, some analysts are predicting that the labor force participation rate might return back to the 1970s as many individuals choose to take early retirement and more women stay at home permanently to take care of their family.

“If this comes to pass, the labor strain could be around for quite a while,” he noted. “So it comes down to automation. What can we automate to help out the staff we do have on property?”

Pacious gave the example of on-demand housekeeping. While the guest adoption rate is north of 80 percent, the company still needs to find a way to tie these on demand requests (or lack thereof) into software so that managers and owners can plan ahead for how many housekeepers will be needed on any given day.

Justin Knight, President & CEO, Apple Hospitality, REIT, agreed, noting that his company — and the industry at large — is competing with Amazon and other large retailers for workers. So, Apple Hospitality is using online channels to find people either via social media or online recruiting.

For Larry Cuculic, President & CEO, Best Western Hotels & Resorts, one of the hardest parts is overcoming the “bad reputation” the industry acquired during the pandemic.

“At its worst point, our industry lost 3 million jobs, and we’re still down 1.5 million. What we’ve found is that when our current employees recruit friends and family members to work at our hotels, we have much higher retention rates. That means that we have to help our hoteliers learn how to be an employer of choice for which consumers want to work,” he added. HT