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We look forward to the world coming to know Personality Hotels as an operator of some of the finest lifestyle properties in the world and the launch client for ATRIO, the platform that moved an industry.”

The guiding pillars of ATRIO include the industry’s only platform purpose-built for true cloud computing, a highly innovative user experience, modular design, and the use of an Enterprise Service Bus

“Deploying ATRIO in the cloud helped reduce our implementation costs considerably,”

bringing together social media components like Foursquare check-ins, with exclusive offline experiences and concerts to reach SPG members in new, interesting ways."

Nine artists will be carefully selected to represent the essence of each brand

SPG is launching a first-of-its-kind global program On Tour with SPG: Hear the Music, See the World which will allow SPG members to experience exclusive music events in incredible destinations such as Dubai, Macau, Santiago, Paris, Miami and more

an integrated central reservation system helps to convert browsers into customers.

A Central Reservation System (CRS) is software used within the tourism industry for the purposes of marketing and sales.

The goal of the pilot is to get feedback from guests and employees using NFC phones for a variety of services.

The technology also increases security.

experience gained

Ayers Saint Gross used a combination of satellite, GIS and aircraft imaging to create the 3D map, which can be constantly updated as new buildings arise and others are torn down.

Ayers Saint Gross is in the process of working with Apple and Android to create smart phone versions of the app, and could not give an estimate of when it would be ready for the public.

Not only does it allow tourists to navigate the city, but it also sells the city to potential clients interested in bringing their meetings and events to Baltimore, he said.

“Our aim was to take full advantage of today’s travelers’ increasing affinity with mobile devices, so implementing a device management system to cater to our specific requirements was of paramount importance,” said Sylvia Chung, General Manager of the L’Hotel élan. “With MVI’s MDM Solution we can ensure the security and manageability of the devices as well as guests’ privacy while using them without compromising flexibility and usability.”  

MVI has launched an industry-first Mobile Device Management (MDM) solution that provides effective management of smart mobile devices to support interactive, live and on-demand video services in hotels.

has a history of taking a service people used to pay good money for, and simply offering it up for free.

online travel agency (OTA) business. Investors in traditional OTAs should be worried.

Cutting out the middleman

However, it is clear that Google will include your Google+ business page/s in the search engine results, which means a big SEO factor to consider. Kingpin's excellent blog post explains it best: "Due to the nature of their primary business, Google is able to use its leverage to make businesses that create and maintain a Page on its own social network easier to search on Google than pages or accounts on their competitors’ sites."

BookingCenter, a provider of integrated Property Management Systems, Central Reservations and Global Distribution

MyPMSTM - a full-featured, Web-based PMS delivering all of the advantages of remote centralized management with integrated Internet Reservations and Global Distribution.

MyPMS is designed and proven to seamlessly tie together PMS, CRS and GDS functions; it's simple and affordable; and it's delivered over the Internet for unmatched accessibility, accuracy and efficiency in remote, real-time multi-property management.

Finding the right hotel is complex and, unlike booking a flight or reserving a car, it is a personal decision process - one which no one understands better than hoteliers.  We believe Roomkey.com will provide consumers with an innovative resource that will give them unprecedented confidence in their booking decisions

HeBS digital Blog Archive for the ‘Online Travel Agencies (OTAs)’ Category The OTA Billboard Effect or the Lazy Man’s Approach to Hotel DistributionMonday, August 1st, 2011 The following article is Max Starkov’s latest contribution to the “Successful eMarketing” blog on HOTELS magazine’s website The existence of the so-called billboard effect is not a new marketing phenomenon. It has existed long before the online channel became a reality. As confirmed by many studies, any marketing exposure by a hotel produces a billboard effect:  when you launch a banner advertising campaign; when you purchase a full-page ad in the New York Times travel section; when you launch a paid search campaign on Google, etc. The OTA Billboard Effect Lately Expedia reps have been aggressively using a new Cornell Hospitality Report, namely “Search, OTAs and Online Booking: An Expanded Analysis of the Billboard Effect” to convince hoteliers that they should use Expedia in order to generate more bookings from the hotel’s own website due to the so-called “Billboard Effect.” The Cornell Report, based on data from Expedia and InterContinental Hotel Group (IHG) from 2008-2010, is a continuation of a previous report on the subject, heavily supported by Expedia. The report’s analysis determined that when an IHG property was listed on the first results page of Expedia, this created an increase of between 7.5% and 14.1% in bookings for the same property on IHG’s own brand website. In other words, this is a confirmation for Expedia’s billboard effect, which hoteliers should take into consideration when griping against the 25% plus merchant OTA commission. When these “billboard effect bookings” are taken into consideration, Expedia’s commission “would effectively be reduced to single digits,” states the Cornell Report. Hoteliers, rejoice! We have found the perfect recipe for success: we do nothing as far as marketing the property website is concerned. Instead, we plaster Expedia with our sales promotions and wait for the travel consumers to come to our own website and book. As discussed, the billboard effect is not strictly an OTA territory. In my view, the Cornell Hospitality Report is a one-sided research project, very proactively supported by Expedia, similar to the first report on the billboard effect published in 2009. Cornell, the finest hospitality institution in the U.S., should know better than to come up with this half-baked “scientific” research, which does not account for the complexities of hotel distribution as well as the “digital information cloud” we all live in and the resulting marketing and distribution channel convergence which directly affects the purchasing habits of today’s hyper-interactive travel consumers. This report makes conclusions that do not take into account, among many other things, the following: Complex Travel Planning Patterns in Hospitality Many surveys show that people are shopping around on a number of hotel and travel websites before narrowing down their search. Typically in hospitality, these sites include a hotel search on a search engine e.g. Google (65% market share), an OTA website, TripAdvisor, the hotel’s own website, etc. Therefore jumping from an OTA website to a hotel branded website and vice versa is at least partially due to particular travel research patterns unique to the users and not due to the so-called billboard effect: Step 1: “I always search on Google first where I identify a property I like” Step 2: “I go to Expedia and see what the rate for this property is” Step 3: “I visit TripAdvisor to read my peer reviews for this hotel” Step 4: “I visit the hotel website and book if I like the location, rate and what I have read and seen about this hotel”