Technology Feeds Innovation Boom for Hospitality at HITEC 2024

With temperatures soaring this week at the HITEC conference in North Carolina, perhaps it was natural that thoughts would turn to ice cream. But Dan Blanchard, chief technology officer for IHG Hotels & Resorts, had a larger point when he shared a tale from early in his career about he and his colleagues complaining how by the time their ‘rocky road ice cream ideas’ were rolled out, the production had turned so bland ‘you’d be lucky if you got flecks of vanilla bean.”