The first of its kind, The Hospitality Show is a bold new event for the entire hospitality ecosystem with one shared goal: operating hotels efficiently and profitably. Brought to you by The American Hotel & Lodging Association and Hotel Management, the event will bring together top industry leaders, senior executives of hotel brands, owners, operators, management companies and procurement specialists—and their teams—to discover, network and drive profitability.
Business accelerates when the right people are in the room, and this new weekly series of speaker interviews goes 1:1 with the industry’s best and brightest as they build the inaugural event to be held June 27-29, 2023 at The Venetian Resort Las Vegas.
In this installment, we catch up with The Hospitality Show Speaker Richard Wagner, director of certification and compliance at Nomadix.
What issues are currently causing headaches for the industry?
Wagner: Three major issues the industry is facing include:
- Staffing: Both in housekeeping and hotel operations, as well as technical staff at the properties and corporate headquarters.
- Networking equipment availability: The industry is still struggling to acquire new networking equipment, especially wireless. In some cases, the inability to acquire the equipment has delayed hotel openings.
- Data security: Hotels struggle to keep up with the ever increasing security breaches and the protection of guest information.
What new trends do you see affecting the hospitality industry the most in 2023?
Wagner: New trends include the ability to support new guest demands, as well as the ability to operate the hotels with less staffing. Guests will continue to require better wireless connectivity, including increased bandwidth demands. Guests will also expect seamless roaming between their 5G-enabled devices and the hotel Wi-Fi, as well as support of 5G inside the hotel.
What do you see as the biggest opportunity for the industry as we make our way through 2023?
Wagner: Numerous announcements of new AI products are creating an opportunity for the industry to take advantage of this technology, both for augmenting the lack of staffing as well as having the ability to predict network and operational failures. This will create a more reliable operational environment for better guest and staff experiences.
Share one key takeaway Show attendees can expect to gain from your session.
Wagner: To support the demand for IP-connected devices and applications, hotels have typically installed a dedicated network to support each new requirement. This has resulted in increased management complexity, as well as an increase in support costs. By creating a single converged network that can support all existing network requirements, as well as future ones (most likely unknown), the management complexity and support costs can be significantly reduced. One of the major takeaways from my talk is to explain what a converged network is and what benefits it provides to the hotel. In particular, the deployment of a converged network architecture can provide a hotel with the ability to future proof the hotel, thus reducing future operational or deployment costs, along with reducing the amount of time to deploy future/unknown applications.
Lastly, HTNG has recently completed a workgroup called “Next Generation Technology Infrastructure” that will provide hoteliers with design, implementation and support of a hotel converged network. A panel discussion of the results of this effort will also be presented in another session.