Although providing excellent guest service always has been important for future word-of-mouth advertising, the numbers today are exponentially that much greater. It is vital to communicate just how important frontline team members are to the hotel's brand-management efforts.

Associate Editor Chris Crowell kicks off H&MM's In Your Shoes campaign live from the Mystic Marriott (Conn.), where he has already set out to win an iPod for offering exceptional guest service.

Bad weather leads Concord Hospitality CEO to his own "Undercover Boss" experience.

ChoiceADVANTAGE, currently available to franchisees in North America, will be deployed to nearly 5,000 hotels by 2012. Choice also plans to roll out the system to international properties later in 2010.

One common theme of most hotel industry hospitality training programs is an emphasis on encouraging frontline associates to be proactive in anticipating needs in advance and in voluntarily mentioning additional, relevant details. Yet in order to deliver proactive hospitality, frontline associates must first possess a strong working knowledge of their product.

Guests' personal data is passed throughout a hotel's network on a daily basis and can be found anywhere from the point-of-sale system to the property-management system to the financial records and guest-profile databases. It is often collected via the swipe of a credit card and transmitted electronically, but even encrypted technology won't stop it from getting in the wrong hands.

Visa has levied a July 1 deadline for merchants to conform to the PCI Data Security Standard, a set of requirements for enhancing payment account data security developed by the PCI Security Standards Council. Here are the 12 requirements for compliance.

Not being able to accept credit card payments is a nightmare hotel operators would never want to experience, but if managers don't start implementing processes to secure guests' personal data, it could soon become a reality. Credit card processors are threatening to pull the plug on merchants who fail to follow Payment Card Industry compliance standards and consequently wind up with a security breach.

A week-long series on PCI compliance culminates at 2 p.m. ET Friday, May 7, with a free Live Chat, featuring data security experts to answer your questions on preparing for Visa's July 1 compliance deadline. Each part of the series—articles, blogs and guest commentary—is housed here.

Revenue management should be viewed as a complete revenue strategy that helps truly define the value of a guest, rather than simply price gouging.