2020 Hotel & Restaurant Security Study

The saying among security experts goes, “There are two types of companies: those that have had a security breach and those that don’t know yet that they have been breached.”

Hospitality has been a target of hackers for many reasons, perhaps sometimes due to a sluggishness to roll out appropriate measures to protect organizations. Data has not only become a commodity for hotels and restaurants – but for hackers and fraudsters as well. News of security lapses in the hospitality industry have become increasingly common. In 2017, BakerHostetler Data Security Incident Response Report put hospitality as the fourth most impacted industry for data breaches after healthcare, finance and higher education. As more ways to utilize guest information for nefarious gain materialize, bad actors who seek ways to access valuable data from businesses will not be deterred.

One well-placed security roadblock simply becomes a mere detour for fraudsters to find new routes to valuable guest, payment and business data. With this, companies need to be hyper-vigilant, which can yield confusion, frustration and a general sense of hopelessness as business struggle to stay ahead of the security curve – or curveballs.

In Hospitality Technology’s 2020 Payment & Data Security Study, hotel and restaurant operators pull back the curtain on security investments, strategy and frustration points to provide a fuller picture of the state of security in hospitality.