Hotel Front Office Management, 3rd Edition

130 CHAPTER 5: RESERVATIONSbrands. This corporation has 490,000 guest rooms and hosts more than 150 millionguests each year. Six Continents Hotels reservations system Holidex processes more than100 million reservations per year. 2Carlson Hospitality WorldwideCarlson Hospitality Worldwide’s central reservation system is called Curtis-C (pronounced“courtesy”). It services approximately 730 hotel locations and six cruise shipsoperating on all seven continents. For the year 2000, it processed approximately 8,900reservations per day, with a total of 3,242,031 for that year. Brands include Regent InternationalHotels, Radisson Hotels & Resorts, Country Inns & Suites by Carlson, ParkPlaza and Park Inn hotels in North America, and Radisson Seven Seas Cruises. It isconnected to 455,000 travel agents via the global distribution system (GDS). Curtis-Cinterfaces with the company’s hotels via HARMONY, the company’s property managementsystem, and the CustomerKARE (or Customer Knowledge and Relationship Enabling)system. It also interfaces with the HARMONY Database Manager, which providesaccess to hotel inventory (updated rates and availability) along with the ability to deliverreservations through several distribution systems; the Guest Communication Manager, asystem that manages guest satisfaction information (providing a history of service problemsper guest per hotel and scanning for trends and patterns); and KnowledgeNet, whichprovides hotels with easy access to valuable company information (corporate policies,forms, reports, hotel procedures, and newsletters) and also eliminates monthly printingof hotel reports and distribution to the properties. The benefits of this interfacing of datainclude creating and distributing products worldwide in seconds, making informationeasily accessible to customize the customer experience, allowing for synergies amongapplications and reducing resource requirements, and adapting to changing markets andtechnologies. 3Role of the Internet in Securing ReservationsIn a Hotel & Motel Management article by Bruce Adams, Alan White, from the applicationservice provider Pegasus Solutions, discusses ResView, the company’s centralreservation system (CRS) offered on the application-service-provider model.“Today, you need photos,” he said. “We also are pushing a shopping engine for asofter search, which wants to know what experience customers are looking for.”They could search by summer and the beach, for example, or for family-orientedexperiences or for winter skiing. “We want to build more intelligence into it forthe more savvy consumer,” he said. White said that the number of corporate customersbooking through the Web has doubled in the last year. Those customerswant to be able to use negotiated rates, which adds another level of complexity.“The use of negotiated rates on the Web has doubled in the last year [2000],” hesaid. “We see increased booking volume on the Web, which slightly erodes GlobalTLFeBOOK