Case Study: Hotel Representation, Services & Booking
Client
The client is a pre-eminent Hotel Representation company. The company’s main activities are:
- Virtual branding of member hotels from simple to luxury hotels
- Managed Benefits & Personnel Administration services for member hotels
- A web site for consumers to make hotel reservations
Challenge
The client set itself a growth strategy that includes:
- Representing, and increasing the market reach, of various hotels globally and thus be a product leader in the representation business
- Create new stream of revenue of commissions on hotel bookings by consumers
The key challenges faced by the Management team were:
- Finding a reliable technology partner for achieving the growth objectives
- Providing a competitive differentiation factor by driving personalized service to members and consumers
- Provide consumers easy access to seasonal offers and special programs and track customers to build a database for future programs.
Solution
Iris helped create the IT strategy to align with the client’s business strategy. This strategy was executed by Iris through the development of:
- A content management solution with workflows to make the web site dynamic
- A Membership management system
- The Managed Benefits & Personnel Administration service application for personlization
- A brand new consumer web site to work alongside the Content Management system
- Multiple search options for selecting a hotel including a web-based Map interface
- Searching hotels on 3rd party GDS applications.
- An advertisement management module
- An eCommerce module
The solution also includes frequent updating of Meta data so that the consumer web site is picked by various web search crawlers.
Benefits
- High growth rate in revenues
- Lower costs in uploading and managing customer content. Increased synergies between Representation business and consumer business. New revenue stream through adverts
- Increased traffic to the consumer web site providing greater awareness for the client’s virtual brands
Technology
- Tools: .NET 2.0, SQL Server 2005, Flash, ASP Mail, CuteChat
- Interfaces: FCK, Google Maps, Perot Commission settlement, ProtX payment gateway, XE.com Forex Converter, HotelZon GDS