Hotel Technology Next Generation (HTNG) today announced the release of new specifications that add functionality across a range of hotel systems and operations, including Point of Sale, distribution, marketing, loyalty, and guest-room technology management.
• Point of Sale Version 1.0 – A new, modern standard enhances functionality and reliability of the traditional PMS-POS interface, including lookup and verification of guests or membership (club) accounts, charge posting and retrieval of charge-posting details.
• Customer Profile Version 2.0 –Significant updates have been made to Version 1.0 to add support for vouchers associated with a profile (such as free nights from loyalty programs), to facilitate loyalty program enrollment, to support social media, and to track marketing offers.
• Intelligent Guest Room Version 1.0 – This new specification allows hotel systems to verify proper functioning of guest room devices and to receive automatic notification messages when problems occur.
• Product Distribution - Shop/Book Version 2.0 – Updated specifications now allow for real-time shopping and booking of preconfigured and dynamic packages.
These new and updated standards result from the combined effort of nearly 80 hotel companies and technology service providers over the past six months. Technologists interested in more information about any of HTNG’s efforts around standards, best practices and new product development should visit http://htng.org/workgroups.
The specifications are available to the public at the links above, and certification will be available for vendor product shortly. By requiring HTNG Certified interfaces from their vendors, hotels can reduce the time and risk of interfaces today, while improving flexibility and minimizing long-term cost of ownership and management of complex interfaces as various connected systems are replaced in future years.
About Hotel Technology Next Generation
The premier technology solutions association in the hospitality industry, HTNG is a self-funded, nonprofit organization with members from hotel and hospitality companies, technology vendors to hospitality, and other industry members including consultants, media and academic experts. HTNG’s members participate in focused workgroups to bring to market open solution sets addressing specific business problems. HTNG fosters the selection and adoption of existing open standards. Where necessary, it also develops new open standards to meet the needs of the global hospitality industry.
Membership in HTNG is open to hotel and hospitality companies, technology vendors to hospitality, consultants, academics, press and others. Currently more than 400 corporate and individual members from across this spectrum, including most of the world’s leading hotel companies and technology vendors, are active HTNG participants. HTNG’s Board of Governors, consisting of 19 top IT leaders from hotel companies around the world, itself has responsibility for about 3.5 million guest rooms. HTNG publishes workgroup proceedings, drafts and specifications for all HTNG members as soon as they are created, encouraging rapid and broad adoption. Specifications are released to the public domain as they are ratified by the workgroups. For more information, visit www.htng.org.
