Introduction
The foundation for creating an amazing experience for guests is trust. Guests may not inquire about the way the business has set up their system of access control, what kind of process is set in place for encrypting their cardholder data and what process was used to record the vendor reviews to ensure they will have a secure application but they surely will notice if something goes wrong with either of those things: they may have a problem processing payment transaction, their credit card has been hacked, they may have a confusing way to give consent to receive communications from your establishment, or the hotel/establishment did nothing to rectify the situation when a safety incident has occurred.
This is why every software development company that is in the hospitality industry must consider security and compliance as a standard feature and not something that is added after the fact. In the hospitality industry, technological solutions touch some of the most sensitive sections of the customer journey: the guest’s identity, credit card information, reservation history, room preferences, forms of communication, and, in some cases, the guests’ location-based activity. If these systems are weak, the damage done by the system breakdown is not just technological in nature. It also has operational, customer confidence, and brand credibility ramifications.
At Appricotsoft, we would like to keep this discussion practical. We are not looking to make our hospitality offerings feel like banking applications that are filled with friction. What we want to create is quality software products that we can be proud of; Quality software products that are both easy to use, functional, and trustworthy. To this end, we believe we must start from the ground up and establish the appropriate controls for each product to ensure that the product is guest-friendly and operationally manageable for the hotel staff.
Why hospitality teams need a clear baseline
The importance of establishing a baseline within an organization that operates in the hospitality space cannot be overstated. Systems used in these facilities do not exist independently; they are interconnected and use many different data sources. Guest-facing mobile applications, digital concierge applications, Room Service ordering mobile applications, Property Management Systems (PMS), Booking Engines, Channel Managers, Payment Processors, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Support Tools, and internal staff workflows within each business are examples of how integrated systems can create complex environments. Without clear ownership of a defined baseline from the start, these environments will likely become very complicated from a security perspective.
A well-defined baseline provides answers to basic yet critical questions:
- Who has access to guest information, and why?
- What is being logged, and how quickly can you determine whether there is a problem with a guest transaction?
- Where is sensitive data being stored, and is that data encrypted?
- What vendor relationships could impact the overall risk to your organization?
- How do you maintain compliance with privacy regulations while still providing outstanding customer service?
These types of questions should be addressed regardless of whether the solution being developed is a stand-alone application for the hotel’s guest experience, an extension of an end-of-life application, or a large-scale modernization project in which a hospitality software development company is being selected. Each question posed above will be addressed through the Appricotsoft approach to delivery, which emphasizes developing deliverables that include clear documentation, visible risk factors, explicitly defined tradeoffs, and quality embedded within the workflow rather than added at completion.
1. Access management: least privilege without blocking the hotel team
The first control to get right is Access Management because it affects everything else after. In hotels/hospitals, so many systems begin with shared accounts, broad Admin access to “we will fix it later”, but later will generally never happen.
The best method is to implement role-based access from the beginning. It is unreasonable for everyone to have access to the same data; a Front Desk representative may have access to booking and stay details. The Finance user will need access to reconciliation data. The support team will need limited diagnostic information. Very few people need to have unlimited access to all guest records or full access to payment-related systems.
In terms of technology for our Founders/Operators, you don’t need to get overwhelmed. The concept is simple; every user should have no more than the absolute minimum access needed to successfully execute their job function. The granting of Admin privileges should be extremely rare, documented, and reviewed on a regular basis. The use of two-factor authentication should be standard when granting access to any additional/pprivileged accounts requiring access to payment information or sensitive guest information. PCI SSC states that the PCI DSS will be the minimum standard for the protection of payment account data, and access control is a main component of that PCI DSS standard.
In practice, for hospitality software, this usually means:
- separating staff, manager, finance, and super-admin roles;
- limiting access by property or brand where relevant;
- avoiding shared credentials;
- using MFA for admin and back-office access;
- disabling dormant accounts quickly;
- reviewing permissions at regular intervals.
This sounds simple, but it is often where operational security succeeds or fails. Good access management is also a business enabler. It reduces internal mistakes, makes audits easier, and helps you scale across multiple properties without losing control.
2. Log and audit trails: If you don't have visibility into it, you can't manage it
Logging isn’t just for debugging. For the hospitality industry, logging is one of the best controls you can implement to give customers a sense of security. Logs become the source of truth when a customer disputes a charge on their bill, a room service request is lost, a reservation is changed without notice, or a staff member behaves suspiciously.
OWASP’s Logging Cheat Sheet states that application-level logging is often neglected or poorly implemented. Application logs, however, provide value that infrastructure logs do not. Given that both business actions and system events are important in the hospitality industry, this is especially true.
For example, useful audit trails can include:
- Login attempts and authentication changes
- Changes to permissions and actions taken by administrators
- Booking modifications and cancellations
- Refund and payment status updates
- Updates to guest profiles
- Failures to complete integrations, as well as retries
- Actions taken to support a customer
The idea is not to log everything forever; rather, the objective is to log the right things in a clear, consistent, and secure manner.
A few rules make a big difference:
- Log security-relevant events and business-critical actions.
- Include who performed the action, when, and what changed.
- Do not dump unnecessary sensitive data into logs.
- Protect logs from tampering and define retention rules.
- Make logs searchable enough to support investigations.
This is where many teams accidentally create new risks. They build a logging system, then leak tokens, payment fragments, or excessive personal data into log streams. That is not observability; that is data sprawl. A strong hospitality software development company should help you design logs that are useful for operations and defensible for compliance.
3. Encryption: protect data in transit, at rest, and in the places people forget
Encryption is often talked about as one of those items on your checklist, but in reality, the amount of encryption in place in a true hospitality solution comes down to how well the solution was designed to use encryption.
The most basic level of strong encryption should always be present in the application itself. In addition to encryption for all data passing between the applications, APIs, dashboards, or third-party services, at a minimum,m there should also be encryption for the database, backup, and storage of data at rest. The protection of account data is a minimum baseline requirement of PCI DSS; protection of that data is no longer an option, it is a requirement.
That being said, when looking at the question from a world-service perspective, one question that needs to be answered is: Where is the sensitive data being transferred to and from in reality?
Depending on how the hotel application is developed will determine where sensitive data actually travels to and from. Hotels develop hotel applications to provide services such as:
- Mobile apps and web portals
- PMS integration services
- Booking engine integration
- Channel manager integration
- Hotel payment integration
- Support tools
- Report and export data
- Emails/internal notification
The weak point for the transmission of sensitive data is rarely a single database. Much more commonly, it t is the spreadsheet by way of which the data are copied; the debug export of the data; or the third-party service to which the data are sent; or the staging environment; or the improperly configured storage bucket.
That is why encryption should be paired with data minimization. Under GDPR, organizations are expected to process personal data lawfully and according to principles including purpose limitation and data minimization. In practical terms, if your guest experience app for hotels does not need passport data, do not collect it. If the app only needs the last four digits for reassurance in a payment view, do not expose more. If a support agent only needs the booking status, do not show the full profile by default.
The best security posture is often not “encrypt more things later.” It is “collect and expose fewer things in the first place.”
4. Vendor Risk: The Risk of Your Vendor & What to Do
In retail, there is a heavy reliance on vendor partners, such as payment gateways, PMS vendors, booking systems, analytics tools, messaging services, identity providers, and cloud providers. While the hotel may think that it’s buying one software application, in fact, there’s an entire ecosystem of vendors being inherited.
Thus, vendor risk should be included in the baseline.
When conducting a useful vendor review, it should not be about creating procurement theatre; rather, it should be about identifying how the vendor accesses guest data, how they impact payment workflows, how vendors are classified as either processors or sub-processors, and how their failure in some way would disrupt operations.
Therefore, when evaluating vendor partners, hospitality teams should include the following in their “what is this vendor doing with my data” checklist:
- What type of data is the vendor receiving?
- Does the vendor need this data?
- What security certifications or controls does this vendor provide?
- How does this vendor report and escalate incidents?
- Where does this vendor store or transfer my data?
- How does this vendor manage sub-processors?
- How does this vendor handle termination and deletion of data?
Additionally, this aligns with the accountability requirements in the GDPR, as those who control or own the data need to be able to inform and govern the process of how data is processed across their entire vendor processing chain, rather than just sign a vendor agreement and then disappear. Official GDPR materials and related EDPB materials emphasize that the different responsibilities defined in the processing chain are critical qualifiers of the fulfillment of a data controller under the GDPR.
For hospitality operators, this is especially important when working with integrations. PMS integration services, booking engine integration, and hotel payment integration are valuable, but every connection extends your risk surface. A strong partner should be able to explain trade-offs clearly: what data flows where, what the fallback plan is if an integration fails, and what has been done to reduce exposure.
5. Privacy Practices: Design Trust into Your Product, Not Just in a PDF
Privacy is often thought of as a legal document problem. However, it’s essentially a design issue around the way that products are created.
Privacy-friendly hospitality offerings do a few things well:
- They only ask for the data that they need to run their business.
- They explain what the data will be used for.
- They provide a choice about whether to collect that data when they provide the option.
- They create easy-to-understand consent flows around the data.
- They limit the number of people inside the organization who will have access to the data.
- They allow for the deletion, export, or correction of personal data.
- They take privacy breach incidents very seriously.
The importance of hospitality data being personal is very real. Stay history, preferences, upgrade behaviours, in-app messages, and support conversations can reveal much more than what teams anticipate. GDPR was created in large part as a framework for protecting individuals from these types of processing.
Practical advice for founders and hotel companies includes that privacy should show up in screens, workflows, defaults, and data architecture. And not just in policy documents.
Here are some examples:
- A digital concierge app should not gather broad permissions merely because it can.
- Staff dashboards should hide their data unless there is a clear need for it.
- A support workflow should show the minimal amount of context possible before providing a more detailed view of that context.
- A guest-facing app should make it simple to understand notifications received or preferences that have been set around communications and actions taken on their account.
When privacy is built into the experience, compliance becomes easier, and the product feels more trustworthy. That is also more aligned with hospitality itself. Good service respects context, boundaries, and relevance.
6. Payments: Limit complexity before approaching the implementation
Many hotel operations end up adding too many features to their payment systems. The best way to ensure PCI compliance is to limit the amount of payment data your business handles.
One way to do this is by using reputable payment processors that meet PCI certification requirements, using tokenization, using hosted payment methods, and using architectures that do not allow any cardholder data to reside in your application (to the greatest extent possible). Because of the potential liability, your application(s) should have a data-handling model that minimizes the amount of sensitive cardholder data it has direct control over; all app developers should recognize that PCI DSS compliance is an external model, and do their best to not take on the liability of owning or controlling payment data themselves.
In developing hotel apps, a custom app can continue to allow customers to pay with points, make room and service charges, upsell, etc., without the developer storing more information than necessary. Instead of asking, “Should we build our own payment processing system?” ask yourself, “What is the safest, simplest way to provide the payment functionality we need?”
7. Make the baseline operational, not theoretical
Security and compliance will fail if all you have is a kickoff document.
The baseline should be reflected in decisions about how to deliver something, how to accept it, and how often you review it. This is one reason Appricotsoft’s Unison framework has an emphasis on a structured lifecycle, visible risks, common artifacts, and weekly demonstrations. While AI will help you execute, ultimately, it is still humans who are responsible for achieving outcomes.
For hospitality-related projects, there are usually things such as:
- a role-based access model defined and established before moving from prototype to production;
- logging requirements documented as part of your backlog, Privacy checks factored in to the feature design;
- continued tracking of any vendor-based dependencies;
- ensuring that security and QA gates are part of your release readiness process;
- documenting any changes instead of simply allowing them to occur ‘under the radar’.
All of this does not slow down delivery; if done right, it actually results in you not having to incur high future costs or effort to remediate.
What Questions to Ask Hospitality Software Development Companies
When evaluating hospitality software development companies, it’s important to ask ten of the most relevant questions:
1) How do you separate administrative access from employee access?
2) Which specific actions are logged and can be traced or audited?
3) How do you limit the storage of personal and/or payment data?
4) What types of vendors and integrations do you perform due diligence on?
5) How do you incorporate privacy requirements in your software designs?
6) If an incident does occur, what is your procedure for managing it?
Through a combination of these six points, in addition to generic claims of “enterprise-level security,” you should be able to make an informed decision.
We’ve also discussed some of these concepts in articles on how to choose a hospitality software development company and on hotel app security and privacy. Both provide a reference to consider for teams making vendor selections and for teams making guest-facing risk decisions.
As a third-party reference, OWASP’s cheat sheets are a good reference for secure logging and application security decisions, while PCI SSC is the leading resource for payment data protection via PCI DSS.
Concluding Thoughts
Hospitality security shouldn’t feel like something that’s overly complicated due to fear; instead, it should be professional.
A solid baseline doesn’t make your guest application a confusing maze, but instead helps facilitate a smooth, credible, and scalable application experience. The appropriate people have access to the appropriate data, all important actions can be traced back to the appropriate person(s), all sensitive data is properly handled, all vendor relationships have been reviewed properly, and all elements of privacy have been honored in the overall experience.
That’s the standard we think that software teams need to aim for. Here at Appricotsoft, we care deeply about building software that is useful, high-quality, and something we can take pride in. In the case of our hospitality products, this means that security and compliance are included as part of the initial product ideation process, rather than implemented as an afterthought, post-launch.