With new advances being made on a daily basis, modern hotels around the world are starting to catch up in terms of technology. Most of them now use virtual reality (for employee training programs and offering pertinent information to the customer), in addition to wearables (smart electronic devices), robots, chatbots, or Artificial Intelligence applications aiming to optimize the services offered to their customers, who are eager to enjoy new experiences. Hotel technologies are changing the industry.The growing expectations of the guests about hotel services have become one of the biggest reasons to implement new hotel technologies in the hospitality sector that, aware of the business opportunities that tourism implies, doesn't want to stay behind the international competition.The increase in IT investment continues to place the hotel sector at the forefront of the global industry. Currently, and in order to meet the customer's technological expectations, the hospitality sector has been investing mainly in three areas:

Modern tourism industry promotion is based to a great part on analyzing available data about potential travelers and customers. The private data stored by Facebook naturally are quite attractive to many companies.Cambridge Analytics was presented at ITB as an intelligence service provider for tourism industry, having prominent clients already, like a first-class airline and several high-end hotel chains. Their data manager, Alexander Tayler, explained that the old advertising methods were dying, replaced now by the creation of customer profiles, which allows the product to be divided into segments based on the travelers' preferences.The director of the company is Alexander Nix, the man that negotiated with the people in charge of Donald Trump's campaign to encourage and manipulate the votes towards the republican candidate. The private data of about 50 million people came from Facebook, the website were the information was obtained.

Global smartphone usage topped 2.3bn in 2017. Based on an estimated world population of 7.6bn, that's over 1 in 3 people who now own one. Usage figures continue to grow steadily, over a decade after the release of the original iPhone, as this chart showing smartphone users (in billions) illustrates;

Imagine this: You check into a hotel without speaking to a flesh-and-bones human, without using your phone, without doing anything beyond walking up to your room and getting your eyeballs scanned for entry. You click a button and are suddenly in the rain forest, toucans croaking in the distance as a nearby waterfall releases a relaxing mist with humidity you're able to adjust through your augmented reality command center. Or maybe you're more of a space enthusiast, and you prefer the weightlessness of the intergalactic. You walk into a hotel that rockets off the earth into space, where you're able to conduct your business dealings via hologram as you orbit the moon.

Resort fees, those mandatory nightly charges for Internet service, fitness center use and other "perks'' that hotels insist guests want in one bundle, are increasing on and off the Las Vegas Strip.Visitors will pay as much as $45 a night plus tax on top of the room rate. You won't find a resort fee below $32 a night on the Strip. And you could pay up to $30 per night at Fremont Street hotels downtown.At most hotels, that is in addition to parking fees, which are also on the rise.

Did you know that 40% of US adults use voice search per day? According to Search Engine Watch, people now perform 35 times more voice searches on Google than in 2008. Nowadays, speech recognition technology is more precise--with only an 8% error rate! Have you also noticed that many consumers have recently bought devices that use voice searches? In fact, 2017 was the year that voice recognition truly took off, thanks to the popularity and adoption of home devices, such as Google Home and Amazon Echo. Who would say "no" to the ability of controlling devices with their voices and searching for content on the web by simply talking to a machine? Using our voices is indeed the most natural way to communicate. By talking to a smart phone or other device, without the need to use a keyboard or screen, we can carry out more tasks at the same time and access content more quickly and easily. Google even revealed that 38% of people talk on the phone while watching television and 23% of adults use voice search while cooking. These technological innovations and new ways of communicating and searching for content nevertheless impact companies and how they market their products and services.

At a time technology is disrupting businesses on a regular basis, it is vital to amalgamate those which are integral to build an 'intelligent business' than playing a wait and watch game. In a service industry like hospitality, it is all the more critical to adopt consumer facing technology with shortest of delays so that the first-mover advantage can be reaped. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are such compelling technological innovations which help hotel operators to be really intelligent to stay ahead of the competition. These tools will really help hotels to understand the customer preferences in advance and offer tailor-made offerings even before the customer checks into the hotel. How far the hotel players are amalgamating such technology tools into their day-today affairs? Akshay Nayak tries to find out answers:

Against the backdrop of a shrinking population and a growing number of foreign tourists, the hotel has found success employing robots as a way to both draw in business and reduce staffing costs.

A survey of more than 4,000 start-ups around the world shows that many are ill-prepared for GDPR. The GDPR deadline of 25 May is just around the corner, and a survey commissioned by email service provider Mailjet shows that start-ups are in dire need of re-examining how they handle their data. The survey, which was launched on Product Hunt, received responses from more than 4,000 start-ups in the US, the UK and France