Since the days of roman highways, the foremost requirement of the hotel industry has been preserving the safety and welfare of its guests. In modern times, this task applies equally to the guests themselves, their belongings and also, their personal information.
Hotels spend millions convincing travelers to stay with them, but are the underlying systems and processes legitimately worthy of a guest’s trust?
This Guest Post provides some answers. Gary Palgon, is vice president of product management for data protection software vendor nuBridges. An eBusiness security and solutions expert, Gary discusses why hotels and resorts are such an attractive target and most importantly, the steps the hospitality industry must take to protect guest information.
Your credit card numbers are being targeted by increasingly sophisticated hackers preying on the weak links of the hospitality industry
Ever since Trustwave released its Global Security Report in February, it has been widely understood that hackers are targeting the hospitality industry in a big way. In fact, a whopping 38 percent of all attacks in 2009 were against hotels and resorts. Of these, 98 percent involved credit card numbers.
Why? Because hackers are highly sophisticated and targeted in their attacks, but, truth be known, they’re also lazy. They find what works and repeat it over and over again with the “low hanging fruit”.
Lately that fruit has been hotels and resorts for the simple reason that it’s still a relatively easy job, since by and large the industry’s data protection schemes are weak. This is despite the fact that many of the largest hotel chains comply with the Payment Card Industry’s Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). continue reading →
The Orbitz hotel user interface may be new and improved, but is it enough of a dramatic step forward to catch the attention of travel shoppers?
Wow, sign me up! Nothing grabs my attention better in online travel than a big leap forward for hotel search innovation.
In reality, calling the enhancements “groundbreaking” or “industry-leading” is a stretch. These changes are incremental, mostly derivative and unfortunately not significantly innovative.
Not to denigrate this big step forward for Orbitz, but given the hyperbolic claims of the press release, I was expecting changes that would dramatically surpass the current hotel search paradigms.
Orbitz has definitely provided a more Kayak-like experience, with some improvements like including user ratings when mousing over a property on a map, but in many cases, Kayak still offers better functionality.
What was added?
Google Maps, including street-view
Location, hotel classification, customer review score, amenity and brand filters
What was removed?
Hotel neighborhood / star classification matrix
Orbitz’ attempt to translate the airline carrier/number of stops matrix display to a hotel star rating/neighborhood format never really resonated with users due its inability to categorize and differentiate a hotel product that is much less commoditized than air travel. continue reading →
The Who's traumatized Tommy became Deaf, Dumb and Blind. Airlines have no right to share that excuse. Remember, Tommy ended with his followers declaring 'We're not gonna take it'
Delta Airlines and US Airways put me through hell last week. The good news was, as an experienced traveler, I knew exactly what to do as the various obstacles arose.
The bad news was, it seemed I was thwarted at every step by the carriers in my endeavor to have an uneventful Silicon Valley business trip. I could not fathom the potential outcome for a typical, or heaven-forbid, inexperienced traveler.
Dementors are Real If Delta and US Airways were cast as characters in the world of Harry Potter, they would easily be typecast as Dementors.
For the half-dozen people on the planet that have not read the engaging series of books or viewed the movies, author J.K. Rowling has character Remus Lupin explain Dementors in The Prisoner of Azkaban:
Dementors are among the foulest creatures that walk this earth… they drain peace, hope, and happiness out of the air around them… Get too near a Dementor and every good feeling, every happy memory will be sucked out of you.
If it can, the Dementor will feed on you long enough to reduce you to something like itself… soulless and evil. You will be left with nothing but the worst experiences of your life.
That perfectly characterizes my feelings following most of my interactions with Delta and US Airways. continue reading →
Facebook’s Social Graph is a unique and powerful resource – and companies want to leverage it. A Like on Facebook provides an endorsement that can evangelize a product to new groups of followers and opens new channels of communication if they follow suit and like the product as well.
Please say you like me, then you'll find out why... No need to hesitate... Why don't you trust me? Just click that Like button.
Born on sleepy Vashon Island, Washington 45 years ago, K2 Ski Company has always been at the forefront of brand marketing innovation and engagement with its customers. Even 40 years ago, they were painting barns, issuing collectible employee trading cards and sponsoring Dick Barrymore directed films at the dawn of freestyle.
Much more recently, in a bold effort to engage its website users with Facebook, which some may prefer to call “Like-bait”, K2 temporarily shut down its website and provided one navigation option – to its Facebook page. The main attraction is an exclusive preview of K2′s new 2010 ski line on Facebook.
But here’s the catch, to access the preview, one must click the Facebook Like button and become a fan first.
So here is the question, is it ethical to make the “Like” button part of the site navigation? Or, is pretty much anything OK as the user can opt-out of clicking Like and skip the content, or click Like, view the content, and then click Unlike to return to the status quo?
Searching for a New York City hotel, I discovered Hotwire testing a new feature: Bed Choice. Sensing it might be a bucket test, I grabbed a couple screenshots.
The expanding menu of options provided by Hotwire is revealing more details about the hotel to travelers. Will hotels be able to translate this into larger and more nourishing meals?
This is a brilliant move by Hotwire, as it should simultaneously attract new prospects, improve conversion, and further increase its differentiation from Priceline.
By introducing Bed Choice, Hotwire not only expands its appeal to attract new customers that might still have concerns regarding opaque product purchases, but also improves the conversion potential of current Hotwire users when confirming the bed type is important.
Most importantly, it also provides a critically important new capability for hotels – the ability to upsell.
Screenshots
Hotwire’s new Bed Choice feature appears in the search results page, with an icon prominently displayed next to the hotel feature icons. The icon functions similarly to the other feature options. Hovering over the icon provides a description of the Bed Choice feature, but does not present the options or pricing.
The Hotwire results page now includes tiles highlighting hotels that offer a choice of bedding: continue reading →
To be clear, I am not an Apple hater. My history with Apple goes back to a time before many of you reading this were born. The company’s foresight and design prowess have always been a source of inspiration and personal admiration.
Morphed image provides conclusive proof that Big Brother from Apple's 1984 Macintosh launch ad is actually Steve Jobs from the future!
In college, the Apple II changed my life. It was soon apparent that accounting homework and the pressure on teaching assistants to grade final exams and enter semester grades would never be the same with VisiCalc’s spreadsheet and database capabilities.
While I had some previous experience “re-purposing” (OK, hacking) my high school’s career computer to play Hewlett Packard Football on the University of Washington mainframe, that was only accessing a comm link and spoofing a password. With the Apple II, I got my first experience in social computing by recoding the binary tree game to guess fetishes instead of animals.
Apple made microcomputers both useful and fun. I became an Apple fanboy in 1979. continue reading →
It was great to see that attendance rebounded healthily at the annual Hospitality Financial & Technology Professionals HITEC conference, held in Orlando, Florida June 21 – 24, 2010. The good news was that I had been selected to speak on a subject that combined two of the hottest topics in technology and travel: Mobile Distribution. [...]
The second day of the 2010 Association of Travel Market Executives conference included keynotes by marketing leaders from Priceline and Wyndham, sessions on mobile marketing and new distribution channels, plus perspectives on retail and the airline industry. This year’s conference theme was “The New Now & The New Next”
The first day of the 2010 Association of Travel Market Executives conference has wrapped up and provided its audience of travel marketers with statistics, strategies and technologies to consider. The conference theme was “The New Now & The New Next”
With legions of swooning fans and impassioned critics, the mobile turf battles have erupted beyond the mobile carriers and have simultaneously broken out between handset manufacturers, operating systems and rich media platforms. The burning question for millions of US consumers is “What Smartphone Should I Buy?”
photo credit: Don Hankins
