The State of Payment Security in Hospitality
Industry reports indicate that card-present fraud is on a downswing as many hotels and restaurants are catching up to other parts of the world with EMV implementations. Examining security practices and actions taken over the course of the last 24 months, Hospitality Technology research reveals that hotels and restaurants have made strides to protect their brands and their customers.
The number of hotels with breach protection has doubled since 2017, according to the 2019 Lodging Technology Study (50% in 2018 compared to 26% in 2017). EMV rollouts went from 44% in 2017 to 70% in 2018 and 62% were using tokenization compared to 46% in 2017. In fact, eight out of the nine areas HT evaluated for hotel security practices had seen improvement over the year-long period.
This upward momentum indicates that hotels are not only aware that they must have a multi-layered approach to security, but they are realizing the necessity and benefits of putting strategy into action.
On the restaurant side, about a quarter (22%) of restaurants say that enhancing payment and data security is a top strategic goal, according to the 2019 Restaurant Technology Study. When asked to reveal the status of EMV in their organizations, 40% are already compliant. Another 44% plan to upgrade terminals in 18 months. For those that don’t have any plans to upgrade, the most common reasons were that ownership had not yet made a decision and/or they plan to upgrade only when/if chargebacks become too great.
