News for the Hospitality Executive |
CHICAGO
(May 17, 2012) – Hospitality
technology buyers and providers will benefit from one of the largest
sets of
new and improved standards ever incorporated into a single release
cycle by Hotel
Technology Next Generation (HTNG). Major
elements of these just-released specifications result from three of
HTNG’s most
recently chartered workgroups. The new
standards enhance the sharing of customer profile data across hotel
systems; they
enable improved delivery of guest folio data to systems that need it;
and they provide
a hosted payment scheme for hotel websites and central reservation
systems
(CRSs) that can potentially remove those systems from the scope of
onerous PCI
security standards. “Our volunteer leaders and contributors from across the industry, as well as the supporting HTNG staff, have been incredibly productive in the past six months. We and the entire industry owe them a debt of gratitude,” said Douglas Rice, HTNG’s Executive Vice President and Chief Executive Officer. The workgroup volunteers who collaborated on these specifications represented more than 50 hotel companies and technology solutions providers from across the industry. “Their direction, expertise and collaborative focus have delivered – to hotels and technology providers alike – easier, standardized approaches for systems to exchange basic information,” said Rice. “This allows IT organizations and vendors to focus their limited resources on capabilities that drive competitive advantage, rather than on basic functionality.” A summary of the specifications follows.
The specifications are publicly available at the links above, including the documents needed to prepare for HTNG certification. By mid-June, HTNG‘s certification program will be ready to support product certification for the new specifications. HTNG-certified products provide buyers with the best possible assurance of adherence to relevant standards. Coming Soon: Standardized Interfaces between Point of Sale and Property Management Systems HTNG recently launched an effort to address the often complicated and inconsistent interfaces between Point of Sale (POS) and Property Management Systems (PMSs). The new Point of Sale workgroup plans to complete initial specifications later this year. These specifications will reduce the effort needed to connect any PMS and POS system, while enabling them to cooperate more closely to meet the needs of guests, staff, and hotel owners. Standards will allow a POS system to look up guest information from the PMS and post charges to guest folios, even while the PMS is offline or unreachable. PMSs will be able to access and provide line-item check detail from any POS system. End-of-day reporting processes will be synchronized to ensure that accounts balance, even if the date-roll needs to occur at different times in the two systems. In addition to these technical enhancements, the upcoming specifications should also reduce training costs due to simplification of systems and more consistent interface behavior across brands and systems. For more information about this workgroup and to find links to get involved, visit the Point of Sale Workgroup wiki. For More Information About Hotel Technology Next Generation The premier technology solutions association in the hospitality industry, HTNG is a self-funded, non-profit organization with members from hotel and hospitality companies, technology vendors to hospitality, and other industry members including consultants, media and academic experts. HTNG’s members participate in focused workgroups to bring to market open solution sets addressing specific business problems. HTNG fosters the selection and adoption of existing open standards. Where necessary, it also develops new open standards to meet the needs of the global hospitality industry. Membership in HTNG is open to hotel and hospitality companies, technology vendors to hospitality, consultants, academics, press and others. Currently more than 400 corporate and individual members from across this spectrum, including most of the world’s leading hotel companies and technology vendors, are active HTNG participants. HTNG’s Board of Governors, consisting of 17 top IT leaders from hotel companies around the world, itself has responsibility for about 2.8 million guest rooms. Workgroup proceedings, drafts, and specifications are published for all HTNG members as soon as they are created, encouraging rapid and broad adoption. Specifications are released to the public domain as they are ratified by the workgroups. For more information, visit www.htng.org. |
Contact: Hotel Technology Next Generation Brian Larson Director of Marketing +1 847 303 5560 www.htng.org |