Starwood Works With Two Tech Players To Advance Corporate Group Sales
Starwood Hotels & Resorts this week announced two upgrades to its corporate group sales process: a partnership with meetings technology platform StarCite to streamline its requests-for-proposals process and a redesign of its convention hotels Web site that includes a new RFP engine.
The StarCite partnership, announced Tuesday, will integrate Starwood's sales automation system with the StarCite platform. This integration will enable Starwood to respond to RFPs more quickly and ensure that they immediately get to the proper sales team member, the companies said.
"Starwood's goal clearly is to respond as quickly as they can to the planners while having the most accurate information possible," said David O'Donohoe, StarCite's senior vice president of global supplier sales and operations. "We have similar management technology with a couple of other major global chains, but the difference with this integration is that it provides the ability for this information to go directly to their sales automation system."
The integration now is in its final testing stages and should be fully online by the end of this year, according to O'Donohoe.
Additionally, Starwood today announced it has redesigned its Starwood Convention Collection Web site, which represents its 33 convention hotels and resorts in North America, through a design provided by meetings technology supplier Elite Meetings International. Besides the savings and promotions features, the site also includes a new RFP engine to create a single point of contact for meeting.