Delaware North and Springer-Miller Systems implement standard to secure guest data.
CHICAGO – Hotel Technology Next Generation (HTNG) announces the successful collaboration of hospitality and vendor members utilizing HTNG standards to encrypt and securely transmit guests’ personal financial data. This collaboration to address guest security is an example of the HTNG Success Story; an opportunity for HTNG vendor members to share successful hotel installations, noting how HTNG standards were utilized to improve various aspects of a hotel environment.
The fragmentation of the hotel industry – which collects guest credit card information on more than a billion transactions a year – has made hotels an easy and high-profile target for hackers. Personal information collected by one supplier’s hardware may be sent through another supplier’s system before being stored in a third supplier’s database. Therefore, over the past few years, various system providers have come together to make guest privacy and data security top priorities.
Delaware North and Springer-Miller Systems used the HTNG payment integration standard for a hotel’s property management system and its payment gateway to exchange and store guest data. One step of the solution that will be implemented is tokenization, which is the process of converting credit card numbers to a data proxy. This token is stored in business systems and thus removes the liability of storing cardholder data in the property management or point-of-sale systems. HTNG has adopted and endorsed tokenization as the basis of the industry’s card data protection solution.
Once the practice is adopted by a large number of providers, hotels will be that much closer to ensuring their guest data is protected to the fullest extent. 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.”
Theodore is the Co-Founder and Managing Editor of TravelDailyNews Media Network; his responsibilities include business development and planning for TravelDailyNews long-term opportunities.
