With another year soon to be in the rearview, we’re looking ahead to 2022 for the most impactful trends in hospitality marketing. These trends fall into three core buckets: the evolution of privacy, the marketing operations playbook, and advancing the guest experience.

In 2021, freedom is a fundamental human right -- an aspect of our lives that is so firmly ingrained in our understanding of North American culture that we quite often don’t have to give it a second thought. Personal freedom is assumed to be a guarantee… and yet, it isn’t. The somber but unavoidable reality is this: human trafficking is a global problem that has taken on many forms and destroyed countless lives over the years. It shows no sign of slowing down without meaningful intervention.

Hotels around the globe are checking into Oracle Hospitality OPERA Cloud property management system (PMS) to improve operations and deliver great guest experiences. In the past six months alone, Oracle has seen a 300% increase in customers using OPERA Cloud. The addition of brands including Accor, Banff Park Lodge, Fontenille, The Great Southern Hotel, Jumeirah, Predator Ridge, and Wyndham Hotels and Resorts account for an additional 27,000 hotel rooms across properties in 28 countries.

IDeaS, a SAS company, the world’s leading provider of revenue management software and services, has mobilized its global team of technology experts, change agents, and profit drivers with a renewed focus on sharing deep experience and knowledge to ready hospitality and parking clients for organizational transformation and to maximize revenue and commercial potential.

INTELITY®, the provider of hospitality’s most comprehensive guest experience and staff management platform, today announced it has been recognized as the World’s Best Hotel Digital Key Solution Provider and the World’s Best In-Room Tablet Provider by the World Travel Tech Awards 2021.

Many hoteliers are facing technological problems – especially regarding interfaces to other systems. This was the result of a global study on “Personalized Marketing”, which was conducted by h2c and supported by dailypoint™, among others. Under the title “Global Automated Personalization Study”, 86 hotel chains worldwide were surveyed. The aim of the study was to find out to what extent automated processes, machine learning, and artificial intelligence can serve hotel guests in an even more targeted manner with relevant information and offers, and what obstacles hoteliers face.

Concord Hospitality Enterprises recently completed transitioning 135 owned and/or operated hotels to PVNG, an enterprise accounting solution from Aptech. Previously running on Profitvue since 1999, Aptech’s prior-generation solution, the operator of multi-brand, full-service, and upscale select-service properties rolled-out the solution in spurts beginning in 2020, and last month it wrapped up the project with 35 hotels going live in just two days.

For the 2021 holiday season, warm weather destinations lead the top markets for hotel occupancy in the US. Across both weeks, seven of the top markets are common including destinations in Florida, Hawaii, and California, though ranking varies slightly.

On December 8, 2021, a jury determined that GuestTek breached its License Agreement with Nomadix by failing to pay Nomadix royalties it owed for licensing Nomadix's patented technology. The jury awarded Nomadix $6.5 million in damages. The jury's verdict resolves a breach-of-contract lawsuit Nomadix filed in 2016 in federal court. The parties' License Agreement dates back to 2010 and was part of the parties' settlement of a 2009 patent-infringement lawsuit Nomadix brought against GuestTek. In the trial on Nomadix's breach claim, GuestTek sought to invalidate Nomadix's patents, but that effort failed when the jury also determined that GuestTek's validity challenges constituted yet another breach of the License Agreement.

ASSA ABLOY Global Solutions has announced that Hyatt has selected the cloud-based Vostio Access Management platform with room key in Apple Wallet for Hyatt locations. The first stage of this Vostio Accesss Management rollout includes Andaz Maui, Hyatt Centric Key West, Hyatt House Chicago/West Loop-Fulton Market, Hyatt House Dallas/Richardson, Hyatt Place Fremont/Silicon Valley and Hyatt Regency Long Beach. Vostio Access Management provides Hyatt hotel teams with next-generation capabilities in hotel security, operational efficiency and guest convenience thanks to its advanced software-as-a-service design.