Online group housing technology provider Passkey International Inc. last month announced the two most significant hotel deals in its history, signing Marriott International and Hyatt Hotels & Resorts to use its products to connect most meeting registration systems directly to the hotels' reservation systems. The deals allow most planners the ability to manage room blocks online and in real time.
The separate three-year contracts call for the licensing of Passkey technology for implementation in all U.S. Marriott and Hyatt properties, which Passkey CEO Greg Pesik said could happen by the end of 2004. "Implementation is involved," Pesik said. "There's regionalized training and some property-based training." Hyatt officials said they first would implement the solution at their major convention properties.
The deals are the largest hotel-related contracts for Quincy, Mass.-based Passkey, which for the past several years concentrated its efforts marketing its main group housing products as citywide event solutions to convention and visitors bureaus, hotels, associations and large independent meetings management firms. However, the company has developed solutions for single properties, with some success, signing a handful of resort properties and the Omni Hotels & Resorts chain
(Meetings Today, Nov. 11, 2002)."About 85 percent of the meetings market are not citywides," Pesik said. "It's been our strategy that we've wanted to play in that space. Most hotels have manual, antiquated methods of handling group reservations and events at their own properties."
The upshot for planners is access to hotels' reservation systems and links between those systems and meeting attendee registration tools. That, Pesik said, should help them limit room block attrition and catalog bookings outside the room block made by attendees through the Internet
(Meetings Today, Dec. 9, 2002)."Marriott doesn't want to charge attrition, so they figure if they could find a solution, it would be a major benefit for meeting planners and create customer loyalty," Pesik said. "Hyatt is a big group house, and they're very concerned about book-arounds."
Through Passkey's RegLink and HotelDirect tools, Pesik said, planners will have the ability to see the attendees who are registered for a given meeting and whether their guest rooms were booked inside or outside of the room block. Ensuring credit for the latter is applied to the room block will help planners avoid triggering damages mandated by contractual attrition clauses.
Pesik noted that Passkey has connected to more than 40 attendee registration systems, a substantial majority of which are proprietary, internally created systems belonging to individual associations and corporations.
In the cases of Marriott and Hyatt, privately owned Passkey licenses its technology to the hotels for three years and charges the chains an undisclosed amount of money for usage, regardless of the number of transactions individual hotels, or the chains aggregately, process. Planners are not charged.
Pesik said to expect further development of his company's hotel chain and single-property solutions, but stressed Passkey would abandon neither citywide events nor developing services for CVBs. "We're going to continue to deploy in a manner similar to Omni, Marriott and Hyatt, some within the United States and some overseas," Pesik said, "but it's not to the preclusion of CVBs."
One move Passkey won't make, Pesik said, is to directly enter the attendee management realm itself by reviving the defunct company Event411's online registration and consolidation tools. As part of a foreclosure, Passkey acquired Event411's assets and technology after the latter cratered in the summer of 2002
(Meetings Today, Aug. 12, 2002) but has never offered or developed them. Pesik said they will continue not to do so.
"It doesn't make any sense for Passkey to put out its own registration system," Pesik said. "There are well over 100 proprietary registration systems out there. Why fight that battle? Housing's tough enough."