Tag Archives: Cybersecurity

Hospitality Industry Technology Update: “Security Flaw In Hotel Wi-Fi Routers Could Put Devices At Risk”

“This is the second time in recent months that security researchers have warned of hotel Wi-Fi networks being a potential vectorWireless data security of attack for cybercriminals, providing a not-so-subtle reminder that individuals must be ever-vigilant regarding the security of their devices and access points.”

Cylance, a security vendor, says that its security researchers at the Sophisticated Penetration Exploitation and Research team (SPEAR) have uncovered a flaw in the InnGate Wi-Fi router commonly used by many hotels that could be placing the devices of guests at risk. According to Wired, the Cylance team reports, the vulnerability could threaten not just guests, but could also spread to the hotels themselves if hackers are able to compromise the router to allow them to access other parts of the hotel network. Cylance says this could potentially impact reservations and billing.

The vulnerability, dubbed CVE-2015-0932 gives an attacker full read and write access to the file system of an ANTLabs’ InnGate device, Cylance reports.  Cyber thieves gain remote access through an unauthenticated rsync daemon running on TCP 873, which then allows them to read and write unrestricted to the file system of the Linux based operating system.

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Hospitality Industry Technology Update: “Exploring The Brave New World of Hotel Tech Amenities”

“The most powerful existing effect of digital technology on design, Jacobs told me, is the feedback loop of websites and social media that plays backtravel&leisure the success or failure of each design choice in real time, making it visible to the guest’s friends, and their friends, and their friends.”

Hotels are my favorite places to think and write, or simply to escape from reality, which is sometimes harsh. The hotels I am grateful for are run by sensitive, thoughtful people who provide the precarious balance of anonymity and personal care that I crave. I want privacy, interesting design, and also a place to be sociable or take a meeting for an hour or two without breaking the spell of being somewhere far away from home. I like camping out alone under the stars, in a nice room with a comfortable bed, a desk, and room service.

As human beings become switching stations for the digital signals coming in and out of our phones, the technological backwardness of so many hotels has become, for me, part of their charm. I take comfort in the fact that hotel rooms often double as museums of Jurassic technologies—the desktop landline that acts as a five-pound free weight, the dedicated button you must push to order room service, the DVD player for which you can rent actual DVDs. Still, the fear that the hotel experience I am dependent on might dissolve into the surrounding digital babble of Big Data and wearable gizmos and giant LCD screens doesn’t seem entirely unreasonable.

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Hospitality Industry Management Update: “4 Ways to Differentiate Your Hotel”

“If you can’t find anything fun that is truly local, then expand the circle of your list to include the county, the state or even the region in which your hotel is located.due diligence Then figure out how to inexpensively incorporate at least three of those items into your property.”

If you spend any time paying attention to trends in our industry, the buzz words you’ll likely come across include “unique,” “authentic,” “artisanal,” “sense of place,” “local,” “craft,” “experiential,” “discovery,” the latest iterations of “boutique” and “lifestyle,” and the single most overly and incorrectly used word in the English language, “curated.”

Today’s trend words all have one definitional element in common: They all are somewhat synonymous with “different” in one way or another. Guests are looking for different experiences in the different cities they visit, particularly road warriors. “Different” in that context doesn’t necessarily mean “better,” just not “the same.”

If this is not your year for a major renovation, and you won’t be turning your lobby into an experiential gathering place or your restaurant into an eclectic journey of discovery, there are still things you can do to be different and successful.

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Hospitality Industry Management Update: “The Threat Most Hoteliers are Ignoring”

“That’s particularly true when hoteliers begin marking their competitive differentiation on price20150327_AirbnbNYC—the average price of an Airbnb listing in NYC hovers slightly above $200/night and is well below the average cost of a hotel room in, say, Manhattan.”

“Is anyone worried about Airbnb?”

Nary a hand was raised when Mark Woodworth asked that question from the main stage at the Hunter Hotel Conference. The head of PKF Hospitality Research had to peer into the sea of some 1,200 attendees, hand above his squinted eyes like a sailor gazing into a foggy horizon, to find any. There were maybe five in all.

“Well, I’m going to talk about it anyway,” Woodworth said.

He was right to do so. The peer-to-peer accommodations platform is a threat to both demand and rate. We’ve documented that fact time and time again. Hoteliers just don’t want to hear it.

This dismissive attitude is based on the fact that it takes a lot of Airbnb supply to truly steal share. To reach that mass, Airbnb needs a strong concentration of willing hosts in high-demand markets such as New York City and San Francisco.

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Hospitality Industry Management Update: “The Good, The Bad, and Especially – The Ugly. Why Responding to EVERY Review is Essential to Your Reputation”

“Address the comment, validate their frustration, apologize for their poor experience, and find a way to make it better.feedback This will, of course, depend on what the grievance is exactly, but it’s probably an easy fix, and your response to the issue will be there forever for all future guests to see.”

Feedback, constructive criticism, or maybe just plain old criticism. Are you shuddering at the thought? If you are, stop, because though it may be hard to take sometimes, it’s essential to the success and well-being of your hotel. That’s right, criticism whether good, bad, or even ugly, is a necessary tool for you and your management team to have and to use. Without feedback, you’ll never know what you’re doing well, and what you could do better. Listening to all comments and responding appropriately and in a timely manner is one of the best tactics for hotel reputation management.

Regardless of whether your hotel has received a positive or negative review, you must give equal attention to both. Don’t be arrogant. Mistakes are made everywhere in life, misunderstanding and miscommunication happens no matter what. Therefore, never turn up your nose at a grievance, large or small. Many potential guests will judge a hotel’s customer service based on how the hotel responded to previous guests comments and reviews. Therein lies the true value of responding to all comments – to show future guests you have responsive management, that you care about your guests and any issues that may arise.

From our very own experience, here’s a quick list of best practices when it comes to responding to reviews

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Hospitality Industry Legal Update: “Warrantless Searches of Hotel Guest Registers”

In analyzing the searches and seizures from hotel rooms, the court recognized that while a guest is legally registered in a room,warentless searches the hotel room is a temporary residence and thus, just like their primary residence, the guest is entitled to the same protections under the Fourth Amendment to their guest rooms in a hotel as they would for their primary residence.

Many municipalities have enacted ordinances that authorize local police agencies to enter a hotel during regular business hours and request an inspection of the guest register to obtain information as to who is in the hotel, when they checked in and their anticipated check out time, how long the guest has stayed in the hotel, manner of payment and private information given by the guest to the desk clerk regarding their home address, car license plate and drivers license information. The municipalities argue that such ordinances and warrantless searches are necessary to help stop prostitution and drugs or to ensure compliance with the length of time requirements for motel guests. Many hotel operators have allowed the police agencies to inspect the guest registers without objection as they did not want to be subject to arrest or citation for not complying with the police requests.

However, some managers have objected and have been convicted of failure to comply with the inspection request. They argue that the police need a warrant to search the hotel registers and further, that the ordinances are not specifically limited to time, scope and duration of the inspection allowed or an opportunity to seek judicial review of the ordinance before being subjected to arrest and conviction for refusing to comply with the police agency’s request.

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Hospitality Industry Legal Update: “Class Action Lawsuit Goes After Hotels That Fail to Disclose Resort Fees”

“Brian Kabateck, an attorney for Brin, said he has heard from many hotel guests who have groused about being surprised by resort fees on their hotel receipts. “This is really an insidious practice,” he saidresort fees lawsuit…Although the U.S. Department of Transportation regularly imposes fines against airlines that fail to disclose the full airfare, there may be too many hotels in the U.S. for the Federal Trade Commission to enforce the disclosure law on hotels, Kabateck said.”

If you have ever glanced at your hotel receipt only to be stunned to see an unexpected $28 resort fee, help may be on the way.

A Studio City man has filed a class-action suit against a Las Vegas casino, claiming that the resort is guilty of false and misleading advertising for failing to clearly disclose a mandatory resort fee at the time that he booked the room.

The practice is not unique to Las Vegas.

Undisclosed resort fees are such a prevalent problem that the Federal Trade Commission sent out a letter to 22 hotel companies in 2012, warning that their online reservation sites “may violate the law by providing a deceptively low estimate of what consumers can expect to pay for their hotel rooms.”

For more: http://lat.ms/1HN6ia9

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Hospitality Industry Technology Update: “Hotels Are Getting Ready for Apple Watch”

The Accorhotel Apple Watch app will work in connection with a smartphone to manage reservations, access hotel information and property maps,apple watch and notify guests when a room is ready for online check-in. IHG’s Apple Watch app is a port of its popular smartphone language translator. It will convert the words a user speaks into the watch into 13 different languages and even offer phonetic pronunciation help as well as a range of common phrases.

At an event in San Francisco earlier this week, Apple released more details on its new watch and showed off a few apps. Along with displaying the weather, making calls (as long as your phone is nearby), and tracking your fitness, the watch will also support Apple Pay, a mobile payment system that processes credit card transactions without the need to swipe an actual card. Ahead of the event, Marriott announced it would be the first hotel company to use Apple Pay, and would roll it out this summer at select Ritz-Carlton, Courtyard, Residence Inn, and Edition properties in New York, Los Angeles, Washington, San Francisco, Miami, and Chicago.

Apple Pay uses the near field communication (NFC) chip in an iPhone 6 or Apple Watch to communicate with specially equipped card readers, providing more security than old-school magnetic card swipers. While this could be a huge money maker for Apple, with analysts predicting that mobile payment systems will process $700 billion in transactions by 2017, it also offers hotels a new tool to measure guests’ habits and preferences.

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Hospitality Industry Security Update: “New Security Mindset: Focus On The Interior”

“We continue to be more focused on perimeter protection than on internal controls and monitoring. It’s clear that attackers are already inside or could be anytime they want and there’s nothing you can do about it on the perimeterJason-Straight-LG…You would think external attacks cause all the damage. But study after study, two-thirds of attacks are mundane insider errors, lost equipment, technology failures, or lack of oversight over vendors.”

Chief privacy officer Jason Straight shares his insights on why organizations are struggling to stop the breach wave — and manage the aftermath.

Hackers keep on hacking, breaches keep on happening. The cycle continues, as major corporations now routinely get successfully compromised. A key element of the equation now is properly and efficiently responding to an attack as well as managing its aftermath.

The same old security missteps–falling for phishing attacks, not locking down sensitive data internally, giving users too much access, for instance–keep recurring. That’s because many organizations aren’t putting their security energy in the right places, according to Jason Straight, senior vice president and chief privacy officer at UnitedLex, which provides outsourcing services and support for the legal industry.

For more: http://ubm.io/1BTm7L2

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Hospitality Industry Management Update: “How Tax Extensions and Regulations Will Impact Hotels”

IRS regulations generally affect all taxpayers that acquire, produce,DollarGuy-620x330 or improve tangible property but especially impact lodging facilities, as these require continual upgrades, remodeling, and refreshes. Hospitality finance executives should be alert to the numerous elections required with 2014 tax returns.

There’s no easy way to say it—the lodging industry will likely face tax challenges in the next 12 months. The past year was fraught with congressional bickering, partisanship, gridlock, and, consequently, no passage of any major tax legislation. There was plenty of drama too, including the troubled rollout of the Affordable Care Act, congressional hearings over lost and retrieved IRS emails, and so-called corporate inversions, with U.S. companies acquiring foreign corporations, swapping headquarters, and reducing their U.S. tax load. This was all capped off by a shift in control of the U.S. Senate after the midterm elections.

Through it all, Congress and the Obama Administration have talked about various fixes to the tax code, but reform has largely remained at the bottom of the to-do list. Now, the new head of the Senate Committee on Finance and the newly minted chairman of the House Committee of Ways & Means, say that tax reform is a top priority.

And at the insistence of the National Taxpayer Advocate, the IRS has recently adopted an official Taxpayer Bill of Rights. It’s not the Magna Carta but certainly a step in the right direction. As 2015 begins, the most important impact of 2014 will be the new rules that will affect tax compliance and tax return requirements, which either stem from the Tax Increase Prevention Act of 2014 (TIPA) or will be triggered by earlier legislation, rulings, and treasury regulations.

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