Hotels Prioritize Data & Payment Security, But Are they Doing Enough?

Hotels revealed that enhancing payment and data security is a top strategic technology goal for 28% in 2018. According to Verizon’s 2017 Data Breach Incident Report, 15% of breaches involve retail and accommodation, second only to financial organizations. According to the report, “Accommodation was the top industry for Point of Sale Intrusions in this year’s data, with 87% of breaches within that pattern. Most of them are opportunistic and financially motivated and involve primarily malware and hacking threat actions. Time-to-compromise is quick but time-to-discovery and containment remains in the months category. Fraud detection is increasing compared to previous years.”

With half of hotels planning upgrades to POS systems and hospitality breaches regular fodder for news cycles, hotels must take every possible precaution to secure guests’ data. When asked to identify what they are doing to secure payment data for HT's 2018 Lodging Technology Study, hotels responses are only slightly less troubling than last year. More hotels have breach protection in place than reported in last year’s study, 32% compared to 26%, however that means that only 1 out of 3 hotels have breach protection in place and less than half (42%) of hotels have implemented EMV. Innovators are less proactive than their laggard counterparts when it comes to security — only 26% have breach protection. In contrast, 40% of technology laggards say they have breach protection in place. Additionally, laggards outpace technology innovators in the use of tokenization and self-assessing for PCI compliance (67% of laggards compared to 44% of innovators).