 Choice Hotels Europe is part of
Choice Hotels International, one of the
world's leading hotel chains. Choice began doing
business in the US back in the 1940s and has
expanded internationally as a mainly franchised
business for more than 60 years.
Today, there are more than 500 Choice Hotels in
Europe and Scandinavia, consisting of four
operating brands: Comfort, the premium economy
brand; Quality, the mid-market brand; Clarion,
the luxury lifestyle brand; and the newest
brand: Sleep Inn, described as 'premium budget'.
The chain provides 24hr reservation service
through a worldwide network of 22 reservation
centres and has access to 35,000 travel agents
through a GDS interface.
Seeking cost-effective and adaptable
meeting room solution for multiple-location
bookings
In summer 2006, Choice Hotels Ireland,
which operates about 21 hotels in the Republic,
began looking for a cost-effective meeting room
solution for its Quality Hotels and Comfort Inn
brands. The number of meeting rooms in these
hotels, located in Dublin, Cork, Limerick and
other cities, range from five to fifteen. A key
factor in their search was that any new system
would have to work well alongside the chain's
PMS system, SoftBrands.
After surveying the market, Choice Hotels
Ireland opted for Rendezvous, the advanced
browser-based conference, meeting room and
catering solution from NFS Hospitality.
Rendezvous met Choice's need for a system that
would be easy to deploy across all sites and
that would adapt easily as the chain expands.
Rendezvous, which was designed for either
single-property or multi-site use, was installed
at the beginning of Q4 2006. As it is a
browser-based solution, meeting room
availability can be instantly known across all
sites, so installation was simple: no need to
worry about local IT issues or deployment.
"It's great to have a common business
process across our hotels,"
says Anthony Murray, Group IT Manager for
Quality Hotels and Comfort Inns in Ireland.
"With a central server we know that all
availability information is out there, and that
means we can really build our business."
The implementation and training went very
smoothly, Anthony adds. "NFS planned the
installation well so that implementation time
was kept to a minimum. Rendezvous is a pretty
intuitive system so it was easy to train our
people."
Long-term benefits
Rendezvous provides many ways to improve
business and service. For example, Anthony plans
to use the marketing module in Rendezvous to
make the most of captured guest data. With this
module, any sort of promotion, such as seasonal
packages, can be planned for either corporate or
individual customers with minimum effort.
Anthony expects other benefits as well, in
terms of saving staff time and using any saved
time for better customer service. He also
expects to enhance his customer relationships
due to higher speed and accuracy of
confirmations and billing with Rendezvous.
Most of all, the fact that all hotels can
access the same information should streamline
the entire operation. "We are very pleased
with the browser aspect and we will be learning
to take advantage of Rendezvous' extensive
functionality as we go forward," notes
Anthony.
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