[Hall of Fame] From Consulting to Forming HTNG
Douglas Rice, executive vice president and CEO of HTNG, will be inducted into the International Hospitality Technology Hall of Fame on Tuesday, June 26 at 8:30 a.m. during the HITEC Keynote Session. He is being honored for his hospitality technology industry influence and his leadership with forming Hotel Technology Next Generation (HTNG).
I have been Fascinated with Technology Since I was a Kid
If you had asked me early in my career what I thought I might be doing today, probably the very last thing I would have said was “running a not-for-profit association serving the hotel technology industry,” much less receiving the top industry award for it.
In fact the only word in that phrase that would have seemed right was “technology.”
Even today, while I’ve spent lots of time in hotels, both as a guest and as a consultant, I have never actually worked for one.
But as for technology, I have been fascinated by it ever since writing my first BASIC program in 1963. Check your history books: BASIC wasn’t even launched until 1964. I was just in grade school, but my older brother was involved in the development of BASIC, and he took me to the computer center and showed me how to write a program that could add two numbers of my choice and print the result. How cool!
I worked my way through college doing machine language programming for the college computer system, which was the first successful large-scale implementation of time-sharing. The mainframe had two processors, neither of which would hold a candle to the one on my iPhone today – serving an entire college campus, and sometimes as many as 250 concurrent users. I was hooked on technology.
So I had learned the bits and bytes, but over the years, I became less interested in them, and more attuned to how they could be applied to generate business value. I particularly liked the challenges in service industries, where even the best technology will fail if you don’t take into account how human beings will adapt to it, use it, embrace it or resist it. Read More »
Hotel Managers Must Take Action on Hotel Credit Card Security
HFTP, the American Hotel & Lodging Association (AH&LA) and Hospitality Technology Next Generation (HTNG), issued a joint statement on actions hotel managers should take on hotel credit card security. The statement indicates three actions that hotel managers, along with IT and finance staff, should take immediately in order to minimize their vulnerabilities and to avoid the potential for hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs and fines that typically result when just a single hotel system is breached. Read More »
