The Instituto Tecnológico Hotelero has held the ITH Virtual Innovation Summit, an annual event held this year in online format. The summit’s purpose is to bring to wider notice the latest innovation and technology news in the hospitality sector.

Reyes Maroto, Minister of Industry, Trade and Tourism, gave the opening address, stressing the government’s ambitious and far-reaching digitalization program and announcing investments worth €355 million to drive the Smart Tourism Destination model.

Security is one of the key points in digitalizing the hospitality sector. This aspect was addressed in the discussion panel “Security in the new processes: the invisible threat” with the participation of Joan Antoni Malonda, GMV’s Tourism Business Developer, together with leading figures from the tourism sector. The panel debated the sector’s best strategy for getting hotels up and running again and recovering client flows within a trustworthy atmosphere.

Speaking about the digitalization of the hospitality sector, Malonda stressed how robotic process automation (RPA) is one of the most efficient ways of digitalizing processes, not only saving time and costs but also cutting down human error while improving client experience, for example in booking, passenger name registration or data validation. As a caveat, he also pointed out that care should be taken when integrating these new vulnerability-prone processes. Design-up security-risk prevention, i.e., SecDevOps, is therefore vital in order to guarantee a proper level of security.

To wind up Joan Antoni Malonda explained that innovation is hardwired into GMV, which plows back 10% of its turnover into projects to meet client needs. In particular, GMV is always prepared to invest its resources in pilot schemes to meet the hospitality sector’s digital-transformation challenges.