HTNG Potential Workgroups

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Potential Workgroups

5G for Hospitality

Spectrum, protocol, speed and latency are just a few changes and benefits of a 5G deployment, but how will this affect connectivity in a modern hospitality company? This group will dispel 5G myths and address use cases that touch infrastructure, IoT, edge computing and many others.

Electric Vehicle Charging Station Integrations

As vehicle charging stations are gaining popularity in hotel parking lots, new requirements are coming into play.  There is a growing need to integrate the EV systems with the PMS systems to allow for automatic posting of charges to guest folios.  Hotels may wish to offer discounts on charging fees to loyal guests or bundle the charging into packages which may require changes during the booking process.  This team will tackle these issues and other to ensure a secure, standard, seamless integration process.

Enterprise Time Keeping

Develop a solution to standardize timekeeping records to be able to compare against sales and revenue data from the point-of-sale. This would also allow for player tracking systems to be able to view trends, labor costs and productivity.

Food & Beverage Mobile Ordering

Allowing for additional customer control, the food and beverage mobile ordering workgroup explores mobility, operational savings, staff efficiency and how to deliver on these guest demands when they prefer a web ordering experience.

Group Billing Reconciliation

Design an interface to create an automated email from meeting planner to meeting host, with web page that details line items charged for a meeting; information would come from many hotel systems, such as point of sale, property management systems, sales and catering, etc.

Hospitality Communications Platform (An Eco-System Approach)

We can follow our UberEats driver on a map, track a delivery to the minute and get text/email updates on our watch or phone.  We all expect important information to be communicated simply and promptly, but that isn't the reality for most hotel guests.  Instead they are left unsure when something will arrive and then interrupted by an unannounced door knock or unexpected call.  By integrating existing mobile and hotel communication tools with existing AI, Work Order Management and IoT technology, we can provide a low-cost omni-channel communication platform to increase efficiency and communicate with guests simply and from anywhere, Guest to Staff, Staff to Staff.

Mobile Device Location

Standardize data structure for describing the location of a device within a venue, including spatial coordinates and common-language descriptions (e.g. "Lobby").

Mobile Device Pairing with Entertainment Systems

Identify existing or developing new standards to support simple pairing of arbitrary guest mobile devices with hotel entertainment systems.

Reputation Management

Facilitate the sharing of data between Online Reputation Management tools and hotel systems, potentially to be used for personalization, satisfaction measurement, service recovery, calculation of performance indicators and other purposes.

Shared Global Network

Create a global managed network in which one (or more) vendor(s) would be able to provide end-to-end connectivity. Currently, this is only available regionally, and not in all locations.

Vacation Rental API Standards

Develop interoperability standards that support the unique requirements of vacation rental. Currently, the property management system (PMS) acts as the operational hub, but connectivity to distribution channels as well as other operational systems, such as housekeeping, owner accounting, CRM and pricing, are not based on standards. This workgroup will scope the effort and either develop the standards or spin-off separate workgroups to do so.

Virtual Payments Card

Virtual Payment Cards are typically used in B2B payment scenarios on behalf of a guest, where the payment card validity and business rules vary from traditional payment card methods. To resolve these issues, HTNG created the Virtual Payment Card standard in 2015. This group may reconvene to evaluate the standard, propose any necessary changes, drive adoption from the GDS to PMS, and the varying systems in between.

Web Content Publishing Coordination

Establish standards to improve workflow approval processes for hotel-related content destined for hotel, brand and third-party sites.