Cruise Line

The hospitality industry as a whole should embrace the benefits of cloud technologies as services ranging from human resources to business intelligence all have cloud-based options.

The next wave in customer engagement is social customer relations management. As more formal tools emerge to build brand awareness and identify influential customers, many leading companies are taking a more proactive approach to utilize social media by customizing offers based on activity in order to increase loyalty and sales.

As hospitality industry operators collect information from an increasing number of touch points, the Federal Trade Commission is calling on companies to self-regulate use of customer data in order to protect privacy.

Mobile apps, wage monitoring and business intelligence tools are changing the way operators manage workforces. From employee portals and performance tracking to mobile timecards and productivity analysis, today's systems are providing more options for operators to manage labor at a much deeper level.

Knowledge is power, but only if you use it. The challenge facing the hospitality industry goes beyond merely connecting with guests on social channels, but how to turn information from those connections into actionable CRM data.

This past April, Hospitality Technology magazine announced the winners of the 2012 Hotel Visionary Awards at the Hotel Technology Forum. Four forward-thinking hotels were awarded the honor in two categories: Infrastructure Innovator and Guest-Facing Innovator. This year's honorees are Flamingo Las Vegas, Gaylord Entertainment, Hilton Worldwide and La Quinta Inns & Suites. The executives behind the technology initiatives share the award-winning hotels' stories.

Lodging Interactive and CoMMingle are helping hotels increase their visibility on the online bulletin board.

Travel Tripper teams with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud to make web-scale computing easier.