Boy, did I ever get a kick in the pants the day Professor Kaye Chon invited me, some guy who works out of his house in San Francisco, to come to Hong Kong to speak to a marvelous group of hospitality educators, students and professionals. 

My goodness, why me? How is it possible for me, a 50-something year old who works out of a small den, using a Hewlett Packard PC � which has this telephone cord that connects to a gizmo in the wall � to get the attention of a group of people half way around the world?

It is a puzzle, but then maybe it is not so improbable to fathom. The reason why, of course, is this telephone cord and something called the Internet. 

I have always been a news junky.

When I was a kid - I would save the old newspapers in my closet - because I just did not want to throw away the boxscores of my favorite team the Minnesota Twins, or all those delicious sports statistics. My collection grew so large - that at some point my Mom became concerned over the fire hazard I was creating. I was coerced to move most of the collection into the garage. At around age 12 or 13 I had a serious collection of thousands of papers and clippings. But then the family moved and my Dad refused to pay for the movers to move my paper collection. 

As a high school kid I was fascinated to discover in the hometown library a microfiche collection of old newspapers. I would spend hours there on weekends gleaming into the past � mostly focusing on old sports news. I could just lose myself in there until being kicked out when the lights turned off.

During my first year of college at Augustana in Sioux Falls I took a position as the night auditor at the Holiday Inn in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The job was a good one for me.  I worked in the middle of the night, balanced the old NCR 4200, and, of course, had time to read newspapers and do a little bit of homework. 

Late one night I grabbed a magazine off the general manager�s desk.  It was something called Hotel & Motel Management.  This was interesting.  People take the management of hotels pretty seriously � so seriously they actually publish a magazine about it. 

While at Augustana my major was business administration. One day while at the library I stumbled across something that really peaked my attention. I discovered that there were universities that actually offered four-year degrees in hotel administration. I was stunned and at that moment I knew precisely what I wanted to major in and do for a living. The hotel industry called me.

Now in 1967 there were just a handful of colleges offering degrees in hotel management including Cornell, Michigan State, Oklahoma State and as I had just discovered the University of Hawaii was just starting a four-year program called Travel Industry Management. I applied to all four of them. The University of Hawaii was the first one to accept my transcripts, and off I went to Honolulu. 

Within days I had registered at UH and found a very good job as a night auditor at the Kahala Hilton. 

A few years later I had that hotel degree and some solid experience.  Over 25 years I worked for several hotel companies including Rockresorts, at the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel on the Big Island and at Caneel Bay Plantation in the U.S. Virgin Islands. I worked for Amfac Resorts, Metro Hotels in Dallas, Texas for seven years and Innco in Wichita, Kansas.

I developed and was part owner of a hotel in South Dakota, which took seven years but was well worth it. 

I did a stint as a GM of an Embassy Suites in Palm Springs, Calif. and I also worked for Park Lane Hotels, which is based in Hong Kong.  I was their controller for the 1,000 room Park Lane Hotel in San Francisco. 

Throughout all these positions - one thing could be certain of my office. I always had stacks and stacks of hotel trade magazines lying all over. When a fresh hotel trade magazine came in I was usually the first to grab it. And without a doubt, I just did not want to throw them away. 

Why? I had a real fear � a fear of losing an interesting article or fact that I would need in my job performance. 

I am of the belief that if you have chosen and trained for a career in an industry  it is very important for you to stay abreast and be knowledgeable of all events going on within your industry. It will positively give you the advantage over your fellow staffers who may not be staying abreast of current events.

Fortunately through my hotel career I was part of the technology growth in the hotel industry.

It seems very odd but at one time these tools were indispensable to a hotel operation-

Remember the typewriter? Gosh, if you did not know how to type you could not prepare the reports.

Remember the mimeograph duplicating machine?  I can still smell the ink!

Remember the standard accounting machine used by hotels - the NCR 4200? It was a monstrous mechanical thing that did a very good job. I thought it was quite a leap to go to the electronic versions � NCR 250, and the NCR 2251. This was in the mid 1970's.

Remember making your first copy on a Xerox machine?

And was I amazed at how I could do a 13-column spreadsheet using Lotus 1-2-3.

I thought it even better when I was one of the first to buy a computer system called Lodgistix, one of the original front office and back office computer systems for hotels. I think the year was 1980.

Remember sending your first fax? I do, it was 1986 and I had to phone the receiving end just to make sure they got it.

And now more currently, do you remember the first time you were on the Internet? Do you remember your first e-mail? I do because again I had to call the receiver to make sure they got it.

And then my lovely wife Emily signed us up for America Online and Prodigy for our home computer in early 1995. I was dazed.  I could not believe the wealth of news available. I stayed up very, very late for the first week I had access to all this glorious news. Since early 1995 I have seldom had to wash my hands of newsprint.

It seemed clear to me, if America Online could provide news and information for the general masses why couldn�t I provide news and information for hoteliers. 

I could call it Hotel Online.

And so it began. I found some programmers in Palo Alto, bought a server, and after about $100,000 in development costs Hotel Online went live in late 1995.

And I remember the early days in 1996 when I would actually sit and watch the server record hits.  It was quite spine-tingling actually. In a half an hour Hotel Online might record one or two users, and I thought, this is phenomenal!

Although it is hard to prove these things, I believe Hotel Online was the first industry specific Web site that:

• used a satellite feed for incoming news, 
• offered industry specific classifieds and 
• what has proven to be Hotel Online's most enduring and important feature, were the first to provide a free e-mail of the days top hotel stories.

Keep in mind these registrations are opt-in which means Hotel Online does not sign people up from lists. We have never spammed anyone nor have we ever shared our e-mail registration list. 

The 18,350 active registrations come from 36,302 total registrations over the 6 1/2 years.  It is a very big job to keep the list free from dead e-mails. A very big job.

Hotel Online subscribes to and pays royalties for reprint permission from several different sources - Knight Ridder Tribune Business News, PRNewswire and Business Wire. For hoteliers the traditional way to get this news is read the small print in many many newspapers or search the Internet for specific news. Five days a week Hotel Online updates our homepage and archives this news for 60 days. We also send it on its way to the 18,300 plus subscribers.

Another example is a hotelier in Hong Kong could use Hotel Online classifieds for a GM�s position that is available. He or she inputs the classifieds and then that same day via the Inside Hotel Online Today e-mail that position available is transmitted to 18,300 hoteliers around the world and those recipients will forward the GM availability on to hundreds, if not thousands, of others. The hotel will begin receiving inquiries within hours of placing the classified. Hotel Online's Internet capabilities beat the published trade magazines by a month or more, and of course at a far smaller cost. Hotel Online charges just $75.00 for this feature. 

The Internet is simply the latest in networks which revolutionized our lives. 

It certainly has revolutionized my life.