Collaboration Provides for Better Protection of Guest Data
Integrating the multitude of technology systems that power hotels is key to being able to provide a seamless guest experience while eliminating excess work and data entry for hotels. However, the benefits of hotel system integration can be easily overturned when that integration allows sensitive credit cardholder data to pass unprotected across various systems.
As an example, cardholder data from hotel guests may be collected by a swipe at a point of sale terminal, then sent through one software program and stored in yet another. The hotel industry processes more than a billion credit card transactions each year, and this high volume of guest data has made hotels an attractive target for hackers. Both hotels and system providers have recognized that this scope of this risk and have come together to make guest privacy and data security top priorities.
Recently Springer-Miller Systems collaborated with Delaware North to use the Hotel Technology Next Generation (HTNG) payment integration standard to hotel property management system, including payment gateway, to develop a secure way to exchange and store guest data. This process includes tokenization, converting credit card numbers to a data proxy. Storing the token instead of the actual card number removes the sensitive information and the security risk.
This collaboration to address guest security is an example of the HTNG Success Story, noting how HTNG standards were utilized to improve various aspects of a hotel environment.
Chris Donahue, Director of Product Management at Springer-Miller Systems, says, “When you look at it historically, integration has evolved incredibly. Before HTNG, two companies would sit down and spend months developing an API and then many more months building it. Now that we’ve got standards, you grab the specifications and you’re in building mode rather quickly.”
Joe Rembold, Solutions Architect at Delaware North, adds, “Some of the workgroups have created a solution for something that isn’t even a problem yet.”