Facing the Future with New Communications Technology

Abstract

The hotel has always been a communications center. Early business travelers, for example, chose inns where they could exchange the latest commercial news, and their meetings turned the inns' common rooms into the precursors of our com modities and securities markets. A single copy of an inn-supplied newspaper, with its vital shipping and mercantile reports, was often passed around until it wore out. Today's hotels, motels, inns, and resorts are communications centers with a some times bewildering array of procedures and equipment for exchanging information and managing properties. The manager who applies recent technological innova tions, however, will find communications need not be bewildering — indeed, they can be profitable.