Amadeus Accelerates Hotel IT Business With $500 Million Acquisition of Newmarket International

In one of the largest travel-related acquisitions of the year, Amadeus, which is known for its airline IT business and distribution services for travel agencies, accelerated its diversification into hotel technology by announcing its $500 million acquisition of Newmarket International.

Newmarket, based in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, offers cloud-based IT solutions for hotels’ groups and events businesses. With 430 employees globally, the entire team and management are slated to join Amadeus when the transaction closes in the first quarter of 2014.

In 2013, Newmarket had $110 million in estimated revenue, and notched an EBITDA margin of 31%.

Amadeus says the cash-rich business, which services 22,000 properties in 154 countries, will be accretive to Amadeus’ earnings immediately after the acquisition closes.

Amadeus plans on integrating Newmarket International’s cloud-based solutions into those currently offered by the Amadeus Global Hotel Group.

“This important and strategic acquisition will strengthen Amadeus’ position in the hotel IT sector, bringing important expertise and key customer relationships to the company that will accelerate our move into this key market,” said Luis Maroto, President and CEO of Amadeus. “With many hotel chains at a crossroads in their IT strategy, and the provider landscape fragmented, Amadeus is committed to playing a key role in partnering with the hotel industry to address its challenges and this transaction will greatly accelerate that objective.”

Source: http://skift.com

OpenTable Acquires Quickcue for Guest Management

OpenTable Inc. announced that it has acquired Quickcue LLC, a provider of guest management systems for restaurants, for approximately $11.5 million in cash pursuant to an agreement and plan of merger.

The nine Quickcue team members joining OpenTable will continue to operate from its offices in Chattanooga, Tenn. OpenTable will support approximately 40 existing Quickcue customers and plans to discontinue offering the current Quickcue product to new customers while it works on its next-generation solution.

“We’re excited to welcome the talented Quickcue team to our restaurant technology group,” said Joseph Essas, chief technology officer of OpenTable. “We’re looking forward to working with the Quickcue engineering team to accelerate our efforts aimed at providing our customers with the most sophisticated mobile waitlist technology on the market and developing our next generation hospitality solutions for restaurants that are primarily walk-in, but accept reservations.”

Source: http://www.qsrweb.com

Extra Technology Focus Needed for Pubs and Restaurants in 2014

Source: http://www.bighospitality.co.uk

TSA Solutions Launches Corporate Dashboard Functionality

TSA Solutions, a leading global provider of revenue enhancing solutions for the hospitality industry, has launched a major enhancement to its Front Desk Upselling solution. The addition of myDashboard, now a standard feature of TSA Solutions’ flagship product, delivers at-a-glance key performance indicators of upsell performance across all hotels in a company’s portfolio, including impact on RevPar performance.

With myDashboard, hoteliers can view year-over-year performance changes by individual hotel or across the group. Dashboard reports are generated nightly from real-time revenue data and can be sorted by date or year-to-date and across a variety of performance categories, including upsell revenue, RevPAR impact and fee percentage.

myDashboard provides instant access to upselling performance metrics for the entire portfolio of hotels, offering insight into the value that TSA Solutions deliver. The reporting tool includes the cost of the TSA Solutions partnership as a percentage of revenue produced, simplifying total ROI and conclusively showing the internal business cases. As part of strategic portfolio discussions, changes in performance are reviewed on an ongoing basis, ensuring alignment to property and corporate initiatives and expectations.

Moreover, those TSA Solutions clients that are operating some properties without the benefit of the Front Desk Upselling solution can integrate those non-partner properties into myDashboard, offering a comprehensive snapshot of the entire portfolio’s performance. “By including non-partner hotels in TSA Solutions’ reporting platform, we can capture and illustrate the true performance of participating hotels’ internal front desk upselling programs for easy side-by-side comparison,” says Klaus Kohlmayr, chief commercial officer for TSA Solutions. “This allows the hotel company to see performance across all hotels, not just the ones using the TSA Front Desk Upselling solution, and helps understand which non-partner hotels could take their performance to the next level with the help of our program.”

TSA Solutions hotel partners typically experience incremental revenue of two to three times higher than their internal upselling program, often with measurable improvements to guest satisfaction scores after implementation of the Front Desk Upselling program. The TSA Front Desk Upselling solution alone will generate more than $150 million in incremental rooms revenue in 2013 for TSA Solutions’ hotel partners worldwide.

In fact, one of the world’s largest hotel companies, IHG, partners with TSA Solutions across 77 of its key contributing properties. “We know there is an intrinsic value to what TSA can offer over and above what we can do at the hotel level in terms of upselling,” says Patrick Wimble, IHG’s director of commercial performance for Asia, the Middle East and Africa. “TSA is recognized as one of the leaders for what they do, and deservedly so, because simply put, the ROI is there. TSA is continually offering strategy and tactics for upselling and revenue maximization, constantly looking at ways to drive that additional revenue, while delivering absolute value to the guest.”

Unlike other upsell vendors, TSA Solutions partners with its hotel clients long-term and provides in-depth training combined with technology to provide the greatest level of impact. All hotel partners are on a capped revenue-share basis, which delivers a more optimal ROI for the client and motivates TSA Solutions to ensure the client’s success. TSA Solutions provides the foremost names in hospitality – more than 800 properties around the globe – with end-to-end solutions that employ a combination of skills education, technology and ongoing performance management tools.

Source: www.traveldailynews.com

Digital Intelligence for Hospitality and Travel: The Technology Landscape

Last post I explored why hospitality and travel organizations need an analytic-based approach that focuses on using the masses of digital (web and mobile) data that is available to help identify what customers are searching for online and how content and search results can be tailored to deliver what the customer wants. This week I spoke to Suneel Grover, senior solutions architect for digital intelligence at SAS about the technology required to support such initiatives.

Better targeting requires better marketing automation technology

Suneel sees the need for added marketing technology investment borne out of the extra pressure on campaign management as a result of more focused targeting. “If, instead of targeting a mass audience with one approach, we need to target 10 segments across different channels with multiple, unique approaches – this creates challenges for campaign management processes,” he said. The complexity to accurately target and execute has driven greater adoption of marketing automation technology. “It is the joining of human subject matter expertise and software technology to utilize data, analytics, and business rules in addressing this new, hyper-targeted, integrated marketing world,’ he explained.

And it doesn’t stop at marketing automation, which traditionally includes replacing the myriad of high-touch repetitive campaign execution tasks with software. Suneel elaborated that marketing operations technology can further supports this cultural marketing shift. “Marketing operations technology enables an interactive user environment to handle creative processes, digital assets, leadership approvals, third party partner efforts, time lines, and much more,” he explained. As marketers imagine new and adventurous approaches using new forms of data and analytics, special consideration must be given to the process of execution. “Failure to execute will limit data-driven marketing’s potential, and this is why strong recommendations have been surfacing around campaign management automation and operations technology,” Suneel said. The alternative is that the propensity for human error will increase, reaching unstable levels and result in negative customer experiences.

Optimizing all of your customer touch-points

I asked Suneel how to bring together all of the data on your customer touch points and get the best results. He explained that it is making the most of all of this data on your customers that will provide the best results. Suneel identified that analytic-centric approaches such as marketing optimization provide the underlying technology to make the most of this data. “The practice of marketing optimization is the endeavor to contact the right customers with the right offers at the right time, while staying within budget and channel capacities, all without cannibalizing future sales or burdening customers with too many messages,” he explained. Marketing optimization helps to maximize economic outcomes by making the most of each individual customer communication. This approach increases marketing return on investment by determining the best offers for individual customers and by providing analysis of the most effective way to spend the marketing budget while considering business constraints, such as channel selection and capacity, offer promotion strategies, and contact policies.

Suneel outlined three main benefits of implementing marketing optimization technology:

1. Improved return on investment for marketing
2. More focused contact strategy
3. Increased organizational efficiency

“The return on investment for marketing is derived from several areas of improvement, including increasing targeting effectiveness which results in higher response rates, improved channel effectiveness, reduced spending on campaigns, fewer deleted e-mails and fewer unwanted ad solicitations,” Suneel said. The math-based approach offered by marketing optimization techniques produce results that are superior to segmentation and rules-based approaches to prioritizing marketing offers. When it comes to contact strategy, Suneel explained that complex contact policies are required to avoid over-saturating customers and violating corporate governance requirements. “Marketing optimization techniques can eliminate uncoordinated and conflicting communications while incorporating relevant relationship factors such as customer risk, advertising exposure and house-holding into the optimization to ensure that valuable customers are receiving the best possible set of communications across every channel,” he said.

Lastly, marketing optimization techniques can show where and how changes in channel usage, target customer segments, campaign budget, and other constraints will affect the business, and highlight financial opportunities and unused capacity. “All of this improves your overall organizational efficiency,” Suneel said, “keeping you from spending time, resources and budget on campaigns that do not bring the desired results.” Overall, marketing optimization blends technology, methodologies, and Big Data capabilities to address the business challenge of making the most of customer interactions across all digital touch points.

Recommendations for getting started

I asked Suneel what recommendations he has for organizations who are embarking on a deeper dive into digital marketing and technology. He gave 3 pieces of advice to those who are embarking on this journey. “First – take it in stages,” he said. Suneel recommends that an organization develop practical, and most importantly, rationale goals that are achievable given annual budget constraints, and current work force skill sets. “Second – do not abuse the power of data-driven marketing,” he recommended. There have been plenty of well-publicized cases of organizations going too far and upsetting their customers due to privacy concerns. Suneel recommends that hospitality and travel marketers educate themselves on these case studies, and avoid falling into these types of situations. “Your brand has everything to gain (or lose) in how you leverage this new opportunity,” he said.

Finally – be open to learning new techniques to solving business problems, and focus on communicating the value to your organization in a manner that everyone understands. “Your efforts should not just be at the data-scientist level,” he said, “business leaders will not adopt data-driven marketing and analytic strategies if they do not understand what is happening. Interpretation is everything.”

Is your organization enhancing its marketing process with analytic technology? What are the benefits that you have seen so far? We’d love to hear your success stories!

Source: http://www.hospitalitynet.org

The Shift in Hotel Bookings from Desktop to Mobile Accelerates

In our article earlier this year, ‘The Truth is in the Numbers: 2013 is Undoubtedly the Year of the Three Screens in Hospitality,’ we outlined the rapid growth in hotel website visitors and bookings from mobile (smartphone) and tablet devices at the expense of the traditional desktop.

The results from Q3 2013 are in, and the shift from desktop to mobile and tablet devices is even more massive than it was at the beginning of the year. There is no doubt: 2013 is undeniably the year of the three screens.

The Shift is Massive:

The results from Q3 of 2013 demonstrate a tremendous and continual shift from desktop to mobile and tablet devices. Across HeBS Digital’s hotel client portfolio, consisting of thousands of hotel properties, we saw this shift occur in every data category.

The most notable developments in Q3 2013:

• Over 35% of web visitors and nearly 32% of page views were generated from non-desktop devices (mobile and tablet).
• Over 12% of bookings, roomnights and revenue came from tablets and mobile devices (not including voice reservations originating from the mobile websites of our clients).
• Tablets generated 210% more roomnights and 603% more revenue than “pure” mobile devices.
• The iPad outperformed all other tablet devices and was responsible for 88.2% of page views and nearly 97% of tablet revenue.

The Shift Away from Desktop is Accelerating Year-over-Year:

The year-over-year growth in the mobile and tablet device categories is staggering, while the desktop continues to lose ground.

The most notable developments in Q3 2013 compared to same period in 2012:

• Hotel website visitors to desktop websites declined by 17.11%, while increasing by nearly 85% via mobile.
• Desktop bookings declined by nearly 6% while increasing by over 57% via tablet and more than 86% via mobile.
• Mobile pageviews more than doubled, while desktop pageviews declined by over 16%.
• Revenue from mobile devices nearly doubled as travel consumers are becoming more comfortable transacting via their smartphones and as smartphone penetration reaches an all-time high – nearly 50% in the U.S.
• Revenue from desktop devices is on the decline, year-over-year, by 4.34%.

What Should Hoteliers Do About the Three Screens?

So what should hoteliers be doing to drive the most conversions from this dynamic shift from desktop to mobile and tablet? They should be treating the desktop, mobile and tablet as three separate channels:

• Desktop Channel: Make sure your desktop website is in good health and complies with best practices in hotel distribution, design, site architecture and SEO.
• Mobile Channel: A hotel mobile website generates incremental revenue through mobile and voice reservations.
• Tablet Channel: Utilizing new content management technology enabled for responsive design on server side (RESS), present tablet users with an enhanced, highly-visual version of the desktop website enabled for the touch-screen tablet environment.

Hotels should serve the right website content in the right device category (desktop, mobile, tablet) while ensuring the maximum user experience, relevancy of information and conversions. This is achieved via RESS (Responsive Design on Server Side).

All three channels must be integrated in the hotel’s multi-channel marketing strategy. Use analytics – such as Adobe Omniture SiteCatalyst – to determine contributions from and the dynamics of each of the three channels.

For a detailed action plan, please read our article, “The Smart Hotelier’s Guide to 2014 Digital Marketing Budget Planning.” There we outline this game-changing trend, what it means for hoteliers, and discuss concrete steps to improve your presence on the three screens.

Source: http://www.4hoteliers.com

Mobile Technology Allows Guests Easy Check-In at Hotels in Dubai

Making hotel check-in easier than ever, Marriott’s impressive new Mobile Check-In is taking off in the Middle East as one of the premier waterfront hotels in Dubai began welcoming guests with this new technology.

Bringing high-tech meaning to red carpet service, the Dubai Marriott Harbour Hotel & Suites is one of the first hotels in the world to utilize this exclusive Marriott service and welcomed its first guest to take advantage of this convenient new service with great excitement and fan-fare.

The new technology allows Marriott Rewards members who have downloaded theMarriott Mobile app to check-in up to two hours prior to their arrival and receive an automatic notification when their room is ready. The 4-star hotel’s staff in Dubai welcomed Ed Smith, their first guest to use the technology, by presenting him with his room key as he stood on a red carpet at the designated Mobile Check-In counter. In celebrating the occasion, Smith was also welcomed at the hotel entrance by General Manager Rajat Chatterjee and was presented with a welcome gift commemorating the local culture. As the red carpet service continued, Front Desk Manager Shantosh Kumar handed Smith with a framed photograph of his arrival, signed by hotel associates, as a farewell gift.

The Marriott Mobile Check-In app makes it easy for travellers to join Marriott Rewards and instantly gain access to its benefits. With the goal of keeping travellers connected, this new Marriott app is just one of the many ideologies that allows Marriott to engage with guests and stay in the forefront of customer service.

As a popular destination, the Dubai Marriott Harbour Hotel & Suites offers stylish accommodations for short and long-term stays and the convenience of easy check-in is just one of the many features that draw both business and leisure travellers from around the world. In addition to impeccable one-, two- and three-bedroom suites, the lodging features Dubai meeting rooms, delectable on-site dining options and catering services for the convenience of guests.

Source: http://www.hospitalitynet.org

SkyTouch Technology Adds Distribution Management to Its Hotel OS With SiteMinder Room Distribution Exchange

SkyTouch Technology, which offers the most widely distributed cloud-based solution for property management in the lodging industry, has fully integrated SiteMinder Room Distribution Exchange (RDX) into its Hotel OS solution, now offering property, rate and distribution management capabilities. Hotels using SkyTouch’s Hotel OS platform now have seamless, two-way connections to hundreds of online booking sites.

“Integrating SiteMinder’s RDX platform into the SkyTouch Hotel OS platform makes our intuitive, reliable solution an even more powerful choice for hotel owners,” said Ric Leutwyler, president of SkyTouch Technology. “Live rates and availabilities are now automatically transmitted to a huge collection of online booking sites, while incoming reservations are delivered back to the Hotel OS in real time. Our customers identified this as a highly sought-after feature and it’s one we believe will improve both the market visibility and operational efficiency of properties using the SkyTouch Hotel OS platform.”

Key customer benefits include:

• Automatic distribution of rates and availability;
• Real-time reservation information delivered straight into the property management component of the Hotel OS;
• Visibility on hundreds of online booking sites through one simple connection;
• All driven through the intuitive, easy-to-learn and use Hotel OS interface.

Current SkyTouch Hotel OS users will have the opportunity to add the new distribution component to their implementation.

“Online distribution is critically important for both chains and independent hotels, but the number of possible channels increases all the time,” said Erik Munoz, Executive Director, Strategic Sales and Global Partnerships, SiteMinder. “The two-way connectivity between the SkyTouch Hotel OS platform and the RDX platform simplifies online distribution and definitely increases the value to customers of the SkyTouch offering.”

In the one-year period starting July 1, 2012, hotels processed 10.5 million reservations through the SiteMinder RDX platform, generating $4.2 billion in booking revenue. The revenue figure was double that of the previous year.

SkyTouch Hotel OS is a true cloud-based solution designed by hospitality professionals. It provides hoteliers with powerful hotel operating system, including property and rate management tools, through a simple, intuitive interface accessible to any device with a web browser.

Source: http://www.prweb.com

How Cloud computing Based Hotel Booking Software engineering the change?

The technologies are changing. In the modern day business the implementation of the advance technology plays a vital role in the growth of a business. Hospitality industry has moved a lot rapidly in the last few decades, thanks to the introduction of internet and benefits related to the online operation. However, the advancement in the technology is constantly creating a new level of business competition.  Henceforth, it becomes obviously important for the hotel business to keep pace with the changing technologies to enhance their booking and reservation program to facilitate the customers with a more dynamic and efficient system of reservation. In this regard the cloud computing based hotel booking software helps the hotel management to manage the occupancy and availability of the rooms in the hotels.

In the modern hotel management, the management of hotel room is of greater importance, as all the information is posted online. The hotel system thus needs to secure itself with the latest cloud computing based hotel booking software.

The cloud computing based hotel booking software offers some incredible benefits to the hotels including:

Easy Reservation and Booking: Booking is an important aspect of any hospitality business. Henceforth, the hotel management which is extremely competitive requires keeping pace with the changing technology. The cloud computing based hotel booking software offers a more flexibility, easy and quick reservation and booking method with a lot of emphasis on the safety and security of the customer’s personal information which he submits during the booking.

Safety Security: There are many online frauds and internet thefts which often make the customer think twice while making payment on an online website. The hotel online booking system requires developing confidence with their customers by bringing the cloud computing based hotel booking software which is safer. It also offers different payment methods to customer which they can use as per their convenience.

Quick update: any booking system is said to be successful if it provides real time update to the customers. The data and information allows guest to know the exact availability and occupancy of the hotel which ensures they could get the booking or not. The quick updates make the hotel schedule their staff, check ins and check outs as they are aware of the arriving guests.

The most important and vital information which is significant on the subject of the cloud computing based hotel booking software is that the system is economical and mid size and small hotel operations can use it to develop a better scenario of business for their growth. Since, the cloud based systems are maintained by the Host Company or provider; it reduces any additional charges on the hotel for the maintenance purposes. Unlike the other software system where any damages to server means loss of data, the cloud computing eliminates this fear from the whole management system.

Source: http://www.whatech.com

How IPTV Can Revolutionalise Hotel Security

The time spent on cue validation and decision-making is often the major determinant of evacuation time in emergency situations, especially in hotels, where guests are widely distributed [1]. The responsibility for the hotel staff is to make the guests aware of the emergency in the first place and to make sure they behave as anticipated by communicating safety precautions rapidly.

From a hospitality TV perspective, this means showing emergency messages and sounding alarms or pre-recorded spoken messages on the TV’s quickly, everywhere in the building.

Emergency messaging systems deployed in hotels today often rely on triggering using old-fashioned physical alarm buttons and simple analogue cables to the IPTV server. It has also been possible to automate the transmission of the evacuation messages, based on a relay signal or similar from the alarm control system in the hotel. Although simplicity is a virtue, the traditional triggering and connectivity mechanisms are obsoleted by recent developments in technology.

Sending emergency messages to hotel TV’s is familiar for one building, but what if the guests are scattered in several buildings? If the hotel is a complex comprising several buildings, each building may have its own alarm control system and corresponding signals. Whatever hardware these hotels use for sending emergency messages to TV’s, it should have connectors for several relay signals.

Furthermore, the recent cloud-based hotel TV architectures have raised a new challenge: How to send meaningful emergency messages and facilitate evacuation when the IPTV server hosting the TV’s is located far away, and possibly even serves multiple hotels in several locations? The emergency messaging hardware should rely on IP networks for communication with the server.

Using technology in emergency situations should be straight-forward and simple enough for anyone to master, yet versatile enough to cater for the needs of very different hospitality environments.

Hibox Systems strongly believes that these problems could be solved by applying recent technology in the field of instant messaging from the front desk to hotel TV’s. With a connected device, the messages could be customized for different situations and updated easily on the TV server. A touch screen could provide a friendly and simple user interface that the receptionists are familiar with from smartphones and tablets. Applying SSL-protected web services for connectivity would make the messaging device compatible with cloud-hosted TV systems without compromising in IT security. A messaging device with these rich features would definitely accelerate the evacuation process, increase the sense of safety and well-being for guests and reduce stress and complexity of the emergency situation for the front desk personnel.

The evacuation procedure should be facilitated rather than obstructed by technology.

Source: http://www.iptv-news.com