Hyatt Debuts Group Billing Tool
Hyatt Hotels Corp. has developed a standardized group billing solution, allowing corporate meeting planners to receive a single bill that automatically ties in all banquet and conference expenditures with all attendee room and food spending.
The solution, which is not new to the industry but a first for Hyatt Hotels, was implemented last month throughout all of the chain's properties in the United States and Canada, as well as the Caribbean.
"This is because of a point-of-purchase system that has been installed in banquet services, restaurants and all cash registers," said Jack Horne, Hyatt Hotels Corp. assistant vice president of national sales. "We've tied that to technology that allows us to tie together all room, food and beverage, convention services, audiovisual and miscellaneous expenses into a centralized, master account."
Previously, Horne said, bills were distributed in those five separate expense categories.
In addition, the new system, which Hyatt began constructing in 2000, reconciles all charges with the master account, ensuring that the final account cannot be printed unless all charges and backup documentation balance.
The system has the ability to sort charges according to corporate meeting planners' wishes, he said.
According to Horne, "We see this as a customer-care initiative. Before this, our group billing was rather independent from property to property, with some handling it automatically and some manually. Now, the process is automated at all hotels."
What is not automated yet, however, is the process of paying the centralized bills.
Hyatt is planning to implement an automatic payment system before year-end, but the process is still one that currently must be handled manually.
Horne pointed out that Hyatt can be fairly nimble with chainwide technological upgrades, such as the development of its online small meeting space booking system (Meetings Today, Aug. 13, 2001) or its installation of high-speed Internet access in all meeting rooms (Meetings Today, May 21, 2001), because of the chain's comparatively small number of properties and the fact that the company permits no franchising of its hotels.