Category Archives: Management And Ownership
Hospitality Industry Management Update: “Legionnaires’ Disease: Awareness and Prevention” (Video)
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Filed under Food Illnesses, Guest Issues, Health, Hotel Employees, Hotel Industry, Management And Ownership, Risk Management
Hospitality Industry Legal Update: “Hotel Industry Threatens Legal Action Over New Wage Law”
Supporters dispute claims that the move was intended to help labor groups increase membership and say the higher
wages will lift working families out of poverty. Under the law, hotels with union workers can be exempted from the $15.37 hourly wage if workers agree…City Hall leaders on Wednesday rejected the criticisms. Councilman Mike Bonin, who advocated passage of the law, questioned the prediction that 533 hotel jobs will be lost in his Westside district.
Ratcheting up their opposition to a new law requiring larger hotels to pay workers $15.37 an hour, representatives for the hotel industry on Wednesday threatened to sue the city over the ordinance.
Standing outside Los Angeles City Hall, hotel operators and business leaders said they are considering a lawsuit based on federal laws. They also released new numbers predicting 1,488 jobs — including at least 140 in the San Fernando Valley — would be lost as Los Angeles hotels lay off workers to compensate for the wage hike.
For more:Â http://bit.ly/1ugf6kx
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Filed under Employee Benefits, Hotel Employees, Hotel Industry, Management And Ownership, Risk Management
Hospitality Industry Health Update: “CDC Confirms First Case of Ebola in US”
U.S. health officials have been preparing since summer in case an individual traveler arrived here unknowingly infected, telling hospitals what infection-control steps to take to prevent the virus from
spreading in health facilities. People boarding planes in the outbreak zone are checked for fever, but symptoms can begin up to 21 days after exposure. Ebola isn’t contagious until symptoms begin, and it takes close contact with bodily fluids to spread.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirmed on Tuesday that a patient being treated at a Dallas hospital has tested positive for Ebola, the first case diagnosed in the United States.
The patient left Liberia on September 19 and arrived in the United States on September 20, CDC director, Dr. Tom Frieden told reporters at a press conference Tuesday. It’s the first patient to be diagnosed with this particular strain of Ebola outside of Africa.
For more:Â http://fxn.ws/1nLAMVj
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Filed under Guest Issues, Health, Hotel Industry, Management And Ownership, Risk Management
Hospitality Industry Legal Update: “Guest Room Privacy and the Fourth Amendment”
In order to create and follow an eviction policy that promotes compliance with the Fourth Amendment, a hotel should identify behaviors that justify eviction. Â This requires consultation of the law, including any statutes that govern hotel policies.
 The hotel should then train its staff to recognize and respond to behavior that triggers eviction.  A hotel should also provide guests with its eviction policy or communicate in some way the types of behavior that could trigger an eviction.  Finally, in the event of an eviction, the hotel must take steps to communicate to the guest that he or she is being evicted.
Hotels are faced with a delicate balancing act when it comes to maintaining guest privacy.  Hotel staff must comply with police investigations when noncompliance would constitute obstruction of justice.  At the same time, hotel employees must recognize their guests’ Fourth Amendment right to be protected from unreasonable searches and seizures.  If hotel employees comply with an unreasonable search or seizure that results in harm to the guest, the hotel could find itself exposed to civil liability.
Courts have recognized that the Fourth Amendment protection from unreasonable searches and seizures applies to searches and seizures in hotel and motel rooms.  Certain exceptions allow for warrantless searches and seizures, including consent.  In broad terms, the consent exception means that a party’s agreement, actual or implied to a search and/or seizure renders a warrant unnecessary.
For more:Â http://bit.ly/1pompRR
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Filed under Employee Practices, Guest Issues, Hotel Industry, Management And Ownership, Privacy, Risk Management
Hospitality Industry Management Update: “Common Fire Code Violations†(Video)
[vimeo https://vimeo.com/107482118Â w=500&h=281]
Petra Risk Solutions’ Loss Control Manager, Matt Karp, offers a P3 Hospitality Risk Report – ‘Common Fire Code Violations’.Â
P3 (Petra Plus Process) is the Risk Management Division of Petra Risk Solutions – America ’s largest independent insurance brokerage devoted exclusively to the hospitality marketplace.
For more information on Petra and P3 visit petrarisksolutions.com or call 800.466.8951.
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Filed under Fire, Hotel Industry, Insurance, Maintenance, Management And Ownership, Risk Management, Training
Hospitality Industry Technology Update: “Why the Hotel Industry Needs Google, Amazon or Priceline to Clean Up the Mess It Has Created”
 It is time to understand that spectacular innovation will disrupt our industry, and embracing this will help to make this transition go smooth.
 Creating a level playing field will cause players in this industry to seize their business. Travelocity seems to be closing down in the next year, and my prediction is that we will see a rise of new players in technology, that can finally interact with us, and cause traditional PMSs, to go under, and with that all kinds of legacy companies that made their business out of the mess we created.
Have you ever wondered why you automatically get the newest version of Facebook on your phone, have made Google a synonym for search, Booking.com has just signed up its 500.000th accommodation and hotels are stuck with legacy systems for decades already, and new initiatives seem to never really take off or struggle to get traction at least? Surely these new systems seem to provide a modern solution to topics we are struggling with (online travel agencies, technology, demand management and pricing)? I started to work in the hospitality technology industry in 1999, to start up SynXis in Europe. We had a revolutionary product, ‘cloud based’, that would connect the PMS to the land of distribution, be a central reservation system for a hotel call-center and would make your scanned brochure (website) come alive with a booking engine that connected directly to the system. In 1999 Google was just starting up, hotels still received the majority of their reservations through their callcenter/reservations department and Booking.com was still Bookings.nl and just signed up their first hotel in Amsterdam.
For more:Â http://bit.ly/1uJF5ii
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Filed under Hotel Industry, Management And Ownership, Social Media, Technology
Hospitality Industry Management Update: “Council to Vote on $15.37 Minimum Wage for Workers at Big Hotels”
“Several council members favor the increase, including Councilman Curren Price, who said it would make Los Angeles 
“a progressive leader” for the nation…Some business groups warn that hotels could be forced to cut jobs if the plan passes. They cited a city-requested report released Monday that said hotel developers will bypass Los Angeles if the ordinance is approved.”
The drive to boost minimum wages in Los Angeles could reach a milestone this week as the City Council votes on a proposal to raise the hourly pay of thousands of workers at big hotels to at least $15.37.
That would be more than $2 an hour higher than the minimum wage Mayor Eric Garcetti is advocating for workers citywide.
Labor groups are rallying behind the plan now before lawmakers, saying that it could pull hotel workers’ families out of poverty and inject more spending into the local economy. Several council members favor the increase, including Councilman Curren Price, who said it would make Los Angeles “a progressive leader” for the nation.
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Filed under Employee Benefits, Hotel Employees, Hotel Industry, Management And Ownership
Hospitality Industry Technology Update: “Starwood’s Digital Initiatives Connect with Guests”
“Mobile increasingly will be at the heart of consumer-branded interaction and offers a plethora of opportunities for customization, communication, promotion, and loyalty. 
The new reality is that tablets, iPads, smartphones, and wearable tech empower guests to travel and do business the way they want to do business. And if hotels aren’t on these devices, there’s a good chance guests won’t be doing business with them.
If you’re looking to get your guests’ attention, smartphones can be a good place to start. More than ever, guests are turning to mobile devices like these to research travel, book rooms, and interact with brands. From receiving instant directions to the hotel when the plane lands to requesting a bike to tool around town, tech-savvy guests can now cover their needs and desires with a finger tap or even a voice command. To catch the attention of the modern guests, however, hotels need to develop the right backlit content to run on these mobile devices.
No hotel company understands better than Starwood Hotels and Resorts. “People check their mobile devices every six minutes,†says Starwood President and CEO Frits van Paasschen. “We can say ‘welcome’ when a guest gets off the plane in New York, Dubai, or Shanghai. ‘It will take you 45 minutes to get to the hotel. Can we have your favorite drink ready?’ That ongoing dialogue didn’t exist before mobile technology. Ultimately, being able to have direct conversations with their favorite brands is what people are expecting.â€
For more:Â http://bit.ly/1rlLgKw
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Filed under Guest Issues, Hotel Industry, Management And Ownership, Technology
Hospitality Industry Security Update: “Those ‘Secure’ Websites Aren’t Always Secure, Study Finds”
“InterContinental Hotels Group, for example, last year used Ghostery to discover the source of unauthorized digital vendors that were collecting data on some of the hotel company’s web pages,
which were slowing down the sites’ response times…’Every millisecond of page latency costs thousands of dollars in lost sales,’  said InterContinental Hotels Group Director of Web Delivery Chad Westfall.”
As brands invest in marketing technologies that make it easier to engage with consumers online, their concerns about digital security are growing.
Companies have encrypted web pages that are designed to prevent third parties from accessing customer data entered online. But many of these sites still have marketing technology that isn’t secure and that could expose a brand to potential data breaches, according to new research from privacy tech firm Ghostery.
Ghostery examined 50 encrypted websites in the airline, financial services, insurance, news and retail industries using data collected from its panel of 20 million consumers. According to Ghostery, 96% of the web pages studied that were supposed to be secure had a security blind spot due to the presence of non-secure code.
For more:Â http://on.wsj.com/1mCbsAJ
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Filed under Crime, Hotel Industry, Management And Ownership, Risk Management, Technology, Theft
Hospitality Industry Management Update: “Legionnaires’ Disease: Awareness and Prevention” (Video)
[vimeo https://vimeo.com/105983681Â w=500&h=281]
Petra Risk Solutions’ Loss Control Manager, Marco Johnson, offers a P3 Hospitality Risk Report – ‘Legionnaires’ Disease: Awareness and Prevention’.Â
P3 (Petra Plus Process) is the Risk Management Division of Petra Risk Solutions – America ’s largest independent insurance brokerage devoted exclusively to the hospitality marketplace.
For more information on Petra and P3 visit petrarisksolutions.com or call 800.466.8951.
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Filed under Claims, Guest Issues, Health, Hotel Industry, Management And Ownership, Pool And Spa, Risk Management
