Y2K Bug-Free Hotels

Updated 3:29 PM ET December 11, 1999

By Michael Conlon

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Once the computer-spooked turn-of-the century weekend passes and travelers hit the road for the first work week of 2000, in what shape will they find their favorite hotels?

Probably not much different, according to one expert, though some inns may be dusting themselves off from an embarrassing problem or two.

The U.S. lodging industry will have spent as much as $1.6 billion trying to root out all potential computer problems caused by the historic turn of the calendar, according to an analysis by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP.

Larger hotels are like cities unto themselves, and face the same problems the rest of the world has had to deal with, identifying embedded chips that may misbehave -- thinking 2000 is really 1900.

Bjorn Hanson, head of the consulting firm's hospitality and leisure practice, says the industry has done a top-to-bottom review of vulnerable systems and he expects nothing more than a few surprises.

"There will be some interesting anecdotal stories coming out of that weekend," he says. "Hotels are very visible. If you're at home and your coffee maker doesn't work because the clock doesn't come on or your VCR won't work, you're not likely to make much of it.

"But if you're in a hotel and the elevators stop working, you're likely to tell your friends, and it's likely to get some media attention," he added. "I'm sure we'll have some stories to tell."

The good news, Hanson says, is that the industry made the corrections it needed by reallocating resources or making upgrades over a period of time, and the money it has spent on fixes should not show up in the form of higher room prices for guests. On top of that, the 90s have been a period of increasing levels of profitability for the industry, though that has slowed somewhat.

What exactly have hotels needed to fix?

Bob Bansfield, who headed up the effort for Hyatt Hotels, said the corrections and reviews covered nearly everything.

Bansfield, an assistant vice president for management information systems for Hyatt Hotels, said, "There were some very obvious ones that are not specific to the hotel industry, such as laptops and telephones, and then things that are more specific to our industry, such as door locks, credit card systems, all systems used in hotels -- accounting, sales, file servers, restaurants, heating, air conditioning, ventilators, elevators and escalators, energy management, irrigation and parking systems.

"It can be almost anything the guest experiences -- from the swipe of a credit card to giving out a room card key to the movie system in the room to leaving voice mail," he said.

"Rather than assume that some systems were okay, we decided to do a full review, beginning in 1995, when we started with reservations and property management," he added.

"About two years ago, we made each hotel make a full inventory...many of these systems are standard across the company so that at 100-plus hotels, most of them use only two or three different systems," he said.

Like many people around the world, Bansfield will be on duty as the new year rolls westward from the international dateline. Hyatt will have a "SWAT team" ready for major problems and plans to begin testing systems in all hotels shortly after midnight local time.

Backup staff will be at the ready, he said, and many hotels have generators, in case of local power problems.

------------------------------------------------------------------------ End

Ray

-- Ray (ray@totacc.com), December 11, 1999

Answers

It's a good thing that there is very low turnover in the hotel industry so that all of the reports received by senior management were based on informed information and therefore accurate. (Not!)

-- cgbg jr (cgbgjr@webtv.net), December 12, 1999.