HITEC Review
There have been lots of mixed reviews of this year’s HITEC, but I thought it was one of the more positive shows. Yes, traffic was down, as it usually is at the Disney-associated locations as visitors put in only a brief attendance before heading off to the theme parks with their families, though the economy and consequent travel restrictions made it worse than usual. It did make it that much easier to talk with the vendors on their booths, of course.
What encouraged me, though, were the evidence of increased vendor cooperation in formal or informal partnerships, and the wider adoption of consumer devices and interface design. As you’ll see from the many news items below, with current interface techniques allowing significantly more flexibility in linking different systems, more and more specialist vendors are staying focused on what they do well and partnering with peers in other areas to offer well-integrated sets of applications. Fully-integrated single-vendor systems still benefit from having a single support point and a common design understanding, but good partnerships are bringing best-of-breed solutions much closer.
Consumer-focused technology was everywhere, too. The many guestroom video vendors were all showing access to YouTube, Hulu and other consumer sites in preference to previous years’ focus on first-run movies. Lodgenet was even using a Mac Mini as a guestroom control box, with the expected benefits in user interface design. Speaking of which, the appeal of touch screens was evident in the number of vendors showing iPhone-based applications for guest reservations and room control, for staff messaging and potentially for much more. Microsoft set up a couple of Surface tables in the foyer, and MSI showed the way forward with a prototype of its PMS ported to a Surface. The appeal, flexibility and intuitive nature of these interfaces guarantee that we’ll be seeing more of them soon.
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Sensibly working to minimize the duplication of efforts to improve the state of hospitality technology, Hotel Technology Next Generation (HTNG), Hospitality Financial and Technology Professionals (HFTP) and the OpenTravel Alliance have joined with other leading industry associations to form the Hospitality Technology Strategic Initiatives Council (HTSIC). The Council, which is comprised of the senior executives of each association, will identify and prioritize industry initiatives and then decide on which organization is best suited to lead each. The additional Council members are the American Hotel and Lodging Association (AH&LA), the American Resort Development Association (ARDA), the Hospitality Information Technology Association (HITA), the Hospitality Sales and Marketing Association International (HSMAI) and the Hotel Electronic Distribution Network Association (HEDNA).