The Top 10: Must-Read Hospitality Technology Headlines From 2017

As we begin a new year, take a moment to look back at 2017 and review the topics and issues that became the eye-catching headlines you and your peers just couldn’t miss. But in case you did, we’ve curated the Top 10 stories from the past 12 months. From POS and lodging tech to robots and the future of hospitality, catch up now on these must-read articles and reports from 2017.

1. 2017 Restaurant Technology Study: The 19th annual Restaurant Technology Study reveals the latest technology trends that are shaping the food service industry. This year’s report reveals that Omni-X is influencing everything from budgets to R&D. 

2. 2018 Lodging Technology Study: To gain a clearer perspective on hotel technology decisions, HT compiled data representative of 64,409 properties, across a variety of topics from budgets to top challenges, investment plans and technology goals. 

3. Robots in Hospitality: Five Trends on the Horizon: Hospitality robots are clearly at a tipping point. They’re now cost-effective to build, are attaining cultural acceptance, and use sophisticated technology to safely live and work among us. But what’s next in this fast-moving field? 

4. 2018 POS Software Trends Report: Hospitality Technology’s annual “POS Software Trends Report” polls restaurant technology executives to uncover what features are top of mind for POS upgrades and what trends will influence 2018 purchasing plans. What becomes evident is that as experience has become a main business driver, the point of sale must go beyond mere transactions to forge a deeper connection between sales and engagement. 

5. 2017 Customer Engagement Technology Study: Targeting Experience: The convergence of mobile and social has been at  the epicenter of the customer engagement technology (CET) movement, changing the very nature of consumer behavior and modern service delivery in hotels and restaurants. Clearly, this is an  exciting time to be focused on hospitality technology, but to many, it is also a worrisome time because of the potential disruption these new technologies will undoubtedly bring, not to mention the level of investment and preparation required in order to capitalize  on their full promise. 

6. What’s on the Menu for 2017: Top Trends for Restaurants: In 2017, Applied Predictive Technologies (APT) said it expects quick service and full service restaurants to continue fighting for market share from fast casual players, and all restaurants to think through expanding their delivery capabilities. Restaurants will carefully evaluate which technologies are truly worth the investment, and executives will push to make their loyalty programs thrive. 

7. 2017 Top Women in Foodservice Technology Awards: In its inaugural year, Hospitality Technology’s Top Women in Foodservice Technology Awards seek to recognize outstanding women from both restaurant and solutions provider companies for helping to turn the tide and encouraging more women to enter technology fields. Each of the recipients is reimagining restaurant processes and operations while demonstrating excellence in leadership, inventiveness and skill. 

8. Hospitality: Unprepared for GDPR: No matter what hotels decide to do to achieve GDPR compliance, it is essential that they act, and even more importantly, that they act now. 

9. The Future of Hospitality: As hotels and restaurants grapple with how to differentiate from the competition through smart innovation, a couple of technologies have made recent headlines. Here Hospitality Technology highlights two areas gaining traction and how they are shaping the hospitality industry of the future.

10. 2017 Hotel Visionaries: This year’s winners exemplify that a hotel cannot operate in individual silos. Each winning company’s initiatives might focus in completely different areas and tackle challenges in very different ways, but each is focused on one thing: enhancing the guest experience and perception of a brand.