With the amount of customer data that hotels collect, the
hospitality industry is often a direct target for hackers. Hotel companies
affected by data breaches in recent years include Starwood's reservation
system, Hyatt Hotels Corp., InterContinental Hotels Group, Hilton and the most
recent, in May, Pyramid Hotel Group, which includes among its 90 properties
several Marriott, Sheraton and Hilton locations. Plus, let's not forget the Sabre
data breach in 2017.
And yet, while 31 percent of hospitality business leaders
believe their customers will stop doing business with them if they were to
suffer a data breach, 36 percent of hospitality business leaders also agree
that breaches are "no big deal" and are "blown out of
proportion," according to the ninth annual Shred-It Data Protection
Report, released today. Shred-It is a document destruction company.
The report also stated that the priority for hotel owners is
better training for their staff. "Travelers, particularly those traveling for business, come to
hotels with confidential work information in hand, as well as their own
personal information, such as driver's licenses, passports and more," said
Ann Nickolas, SVP of Shred-It parent company Stericycle. "Hospitality
organizations must understand the consequences of a potential data breach and
reevaluate their information security and training protocols to ensure they can
maintain consumer trust by protecting customer data."
Additional findings show that:
- Only 23 percent of hospitality businesses use
locked consoles and professional shredding services to dispose of paper
documents they no longer need.
- Seventeen percent have policies for storing and
disposing of confidential information, but not all their employees are aware of
those policies.
- Ten percent lack policies for disposing of paper
documents, and 31 percent lack policies for disposing of information on
end-of-life electronic devices.
- Among hotel owners, 93 percent feel like they
need to do more to show employees and consumers how they are protecting
personal information.
The hospitality segment is but one among the overall study,
which surveyed 100 C-suite executives, 1,000 small business owners and 2,000
members of the general public across the U.S. Eight percent of the 1,100
C-suite and small business owners were in the hospitality industry.
The overall survey found that consumer trust is
fragile, as 35 percent of respondents would lose trust in an organization
following a breach, one in four consumers would take their business elsewhere,
only one-third believe that all digital data breaches are disclosed and one in
three consumers would actively tell others about a breach of which they were a
victim.