From educational collaborations, technology innovations, and partnerships across the hospitality, travel, and technology industries, stay up to date with the latest news from the HI Hub Lab community.

Do you teach human resources, hotel, casino, or club management operations courses? Unifocus, an innovator in hospitality workforce management will host a virtual demo of their automated labor scheduling technology for faculty interested in using the solution in their courses. Unifocus solutions are used in Hilton and Loews hotels. The virtual demo will take place on Wednesday, December 21st, at 3:00pm EST. 

Thanks to the support of our HI Hub Lab community of technology companies, the Tisch Center faculty and students get complimentary access to licensed software and resources commonly used by the hospitality, travel, and tourism businesses. See what software is available through the HI Hub Lab for spring 2023 courses. For more information email Dr. Vanja Bogicevic at vb56@nyu.edu.

Stayntouch PMS – a cloud-native, guest-centric, and fully mobile hotel property management system, enabling hotels to raise service levels, drive revenues, reduce costs, and ultimately captivate their guests.

Cendyn eInsight – a comprehensive customer relationship management (CRM) tool for hotels that includes guest profile and database building, personalization, marketing automation, email marketing and marketing intelligence.

Hubspot – a leading customer relationship management (CRM) platform that provides free software, resources, community, and support you need to give your students a competitive advantage in the job market.

RateGain Demand.AI – an AI predictive analytics tool that uses forward looking and real-time indicators such as flight capacity, news, number of bookings, restrictions to provide a demand index for the next 75 days to help destinations and businesses easily understand and plan their forecast.

Hoteza – an interactive, guest-facing solution for entertainment, infotainment and communication set on various platforms controlled from one CMS. Hoteza products include TV, HSIA, Mobile App, Self check-in, In-room tablet, room control, digital signage and marketing platform.

UniFocus ShiftGenius – a dynamic workforce management platform that includes automated scheduling for labor management, precise forecasting, controlling budgets and real-time reporting for hotels, casinos, private clubs, and restaurants.

Coming soon: Amadeus Hotel Business Intelligence –  a hotel business intelligence solution enabling 360-degree view of rate, occupancy, and distribution trends with both forward-looking and historical data, as well as data from different competitive sets in your market.

This fall semester, undergraduate students in Dr. Bjorn Hanson’s class had the opportunity to supplement and enhance their knowledge and experience regarding property management systems, front office management, and guest service using Stayntouch PMS.

Dr. Bjorn Hanson, retired dean of the Tisch Center and now Adjunct Professor of Hospitality commented: “One of the great practical experiences for anyone pursuing a hospitality career is to see the actual function of a property management system.  Our course text for “Lodging Industry Structures and Strategies”, the first lodging course for Tisch Center students, includes a chapter about the front office operations, but this semester our students experienced simulations of a reservation, check-in, check-out, and other core activities with Stayntouch.  This was a valuable student experience and a major enhancement to the course.”

Professor John Moser’s students in a graduate Leadership course successfully completed an applied project in collaboration with BCV by RateGain. The project aimed to provide BCV with outside perspective and research on social media platform capabilities in the hospitality industry, strategic recommendations on influencer partnerships, and a social media audit of BCV’s hotel clients.

Prof. Moser welcomed the collaboration with BCV: “The students learned so much from their hands-on experience working with the team at BCV by Rate Gain.  They loved having the opportunity to work on real-life projects through collaboration with the HI Hub Lab community. Nothing beats experiential learning with a dynamic, well-run, and forward-thinking company.” Graduate students Stewart Cezar, Hani Cho, Maryam Dimson, Yuli He, Zihan Wang, and Jiajia Zhang,  presented their projects to BCV’s social media strategy team.

Brooke Jarchow, the Strategist, Social at BCV added: “The BCV Strategy and Partnerships team has benefited greatly from working with John Moser and students. Tasked with analyzing the social media landscape across the hospitality, travel, and luxury industries, Professor Moser’s students provided unbiased insights and recommendations based on research and competitor case studies. BCV Strategy was able to utilize these insights when working with global clients in identifying trends to tap into, partnerships to consider, and creative ideas to increase ROI. We hope to continue working with Professor Moser and students on projects in the HI Hub Lab in the future!”

Undergraduate students in Dr. Vanja Bogicevic’s Brand Management class got a taste of a real-life career in digital marketing and consumer analytics in Brandwatch, the leading digital consumer intelligence platform used by the world’s largest marketing agencies and brands. Brandwatch uses machine learning algorithms to analyze large volumes of unstructured text data on brands sourced online. At the end of the semester, students learned how to write complex queries to retrieve unstructured social data on selected brands for their projects and build dashboards to analyze brand mentions, sentiment, and other core insights.

During the semester, students visited M Social Hotel in Decentraland metaverse and were introduced to metaverse-enabled learning in Wonda VR Spaces.

With Artificial Intelligence (AI) being one of the leading trends in the hospitality industry, hotels are increasingly turning to AI solutions from chatbots to AI call centers to offset operational deficiencies and labor costs of servicing guests.

Launched in summer 2022, Cendyn’ new AI Call Center integration was created in coordination with Poly AI to provide hotel properties with the ability to reduce call wait times and create a streamlined system for new bookings, with additional benefits for loyalty members.

RateGain provides their proprietary Virtual Assistant Conversational AI platform, Engage-AI, to optimize hotel’s operations, create upsell opportunities and generate more revenue per guest, ultimately enhancing guest experience and increasing satisfaction scores for the hotel.

Source: Cendyn
Surce: RateGain