In this day and age, it is crucial for hotel businesses to adapt to disruptive trends such as personalised customer experience, IoT, and blockchain. Advancements will also bring new challenges to the hotel finance and accounting team, who must evolve to take on new responsibilities and provide key insight for the CFO’s decisions in the following critical areas.

As we move into a new era of recruiting, the age of the resume may be drawing to a close. Social media is becoming increasingly popular as a way for recruiters to find the best possible candidates for open positions. According to a recent survey by Jobvite, 92 percent of recruiters are using social media to find new talent in 2012. The survey reports, “Social recruiting has become an essential resource in the war for talent as competition is fiercer than ever.”

Advanced technologies provide hoteliers with full-scope support and benefits, from front desk to back-office operations. Cloud technology, for example, has played the key role in improving the end-to-end experience from booking to post-staying of guests, reducing cost and resource demands, increasing ROI, and hence, improving the overall business management capability of the business.

If a stranger asks you to rank your management team on a scale of one to ten in areas such as communication, delegation, etc, what would you say? Most people would rank them unrealistically high for fear that their answers would get back to their boss. How many of you can say that you would answer 100 percent truthfully in your own opinion?

Do you know what is important to your prospective and current employees? Do you work hard to meet those needs? If you answered yes to both questions, then you probably have a low employee turnover rate. However, this is not the case for all employers and many companies struggle with the issue of employee turnover.

It is estimated that by 2020, the world will have more than 20.4 billion connected devices, creating one enormous intertwined network called the Internet of Things (IoT). In hospitality, IoT can be the key to achieving a complete personalised guest experience at an optimised operating cost. Embracing IoT’s endless possibilities can certainly help hoteliers create a good head start in their digital transformation journey.

Leaders are catalysts for change in organisations and managers are necessary for managing change through the rank and file workforce. Unfortunately some managers resist change, especially if they have already lived through previous change initiatives that forced them to do more with less. Managers who are unwilling to embrace change have distinct characteristics that put them "at risk" for derailing in their careers.

Nowadays, amenities such as flat-screen TV, Wi-Fi, aircon, minibar, etc. in your typical hotel rooms are considered must-haves and can no longer act as key differentiators. Hotels will certainly evolve, and the adoption of new technologies is inevitable. The question is, how drastically?

Growth is a constant topic of conversation these days. Executives want to grow their leadership skills. Health conscious folks want to grow their own food. Bodybuilders want to increase the size of their muscles. Companies desire to exponentially grow their sales numbers.

Most today’s hotel operators believe that revenue management will become even more automated with further advances in data analytics capabilities. So, which technology solution is the right one? How can a hotel operator be assured that the solution they implement will best meet the needs of the hotel and enable revenue managers to achieve optimal results? The following are just a few key buying considerations to keep in mind.