This month, Marriott International confirmed that it is poised become the first multibrand company to extend its electronic folio data capabilities outside of the United States as it upgrades and furthers the international integration of its property management systems.
Other multibrand and major hotel companies—including Hilton, InterContinental, Omni and Starwood—continue to make progress in integrating such backbone technology as guest data and property management systems.
These integrations should enable travel buyers to get more comprehensive data, accelerate negotiations and enhance service for travelers.
Marriott has been working with Micros-Fidelio's Opera property management system, which is upgrading its system, to create an interface so that Marriott can provide e-folio content to its customers. Opera is the primary system for non-U.S. Marriott hotels and all of Ritz-Carlton's U.S. properties. Marriott will work with each property individually to provide e-folio data.
InterContinental Hotels Group also continues to cut its number of property management system platforms globally. A few years ago, it completed a project to move a large majority of its hotels worldwide to the Opera system, allowing for better integration with the central reservation system, improved capture of guest preferences and easier management of the rate codes.
Now, 90 percent of its 3,600 hotels worldwide are on the Opera platform, and 95 percent of its hotels are on one of three property management systems, said Gustaaf Schrils, IHG vice president of global technology in the Americas. Comparatively, it was operating on as many as 26 platforms not long ago.
"Outside the country, we made huge progress where connectivity is not as easy and common, creating one of the most connected and global real-time hospitality inventory and rates databases available," Schrils said. "Centrally managing these complex systems will improve availability, ease of support and ease to upgrade while benefiting from centralized reporting and contribute to overall corporate responsibility of reducing carbon footprint by generating savings on utilities."
All properties in the Americas, meanwhile, are connected with central reservation, loyalty and yield management systems, he said.
Hilton Hotels Corp. also made strides in international property management system integration, said Greg Cross, senior vice president of revenue management. Acquiring the Doubletree and Hampton brands allowed it replace a patchwork of property management systems seven years ago with their common system.
Merging with Hilton International has provided a new challenge, Cross said, a multiyear project that works by country toward a common platform. As a results, revenue management has been taken off-property, and the company has a more immediate view of its performance.
"We used to wait until 2 p.m. for a report to come out to find out how hotels did yesterday, and that was a high-level viewpoint," Cross said. "Today, that information is instantaneous. We don't need hotels to submit it. It's balanced with the finance department automatically and we can drill down on the detail."
The integration also means that general managers can immediately know who the top 100 customers are at a given property and respond accordingly, he said.
Improving guest data also was at the core of a platform restructuring announced at Omni Hotels this summer. In June, Omni announced a brandwide reservation system enhancement by providing a single Micros application to book all types of reservations regardless of a booking source.
The system allows Omni to merge guest preferences and profile information across all properties into a single database, according to the company. This will give the individual properties better access to guest history, loyalty program data and other relevant information.
Omni also plans to implement the Opera property management system and will pilot it at a new hotel in Fort Worth, Texas, in January, said Karen O'Neill, Micros vice president of major account hotel sales.
Starwood Hotels & Resorts, on the other hand, is taking a flexible approach to platform consolidation, said Paul Barron, the company's vice president of IT solutions. Hotels in North America and parts of Asia and Latin America are on Galaxy Hotel Systems, and those Europe and the Middle East are on the Opera system.
Starwood is looking for ways to regionalize and centralize wherever feasible, he said.
Starwood CEO Frits van Paasschen said in a recent interview with Business Travel News that, like with Hilton, it would be a multiyear project for the company.
"The opportunity and challenge for us with projects like that is the time involved, the upfront investment and the incredible complexity of the system," van Paasschen said. "If you think about 280,000 to 300,000 rooms, it's a major investment for us, but it's an important area for us to work on. Over the course of the next several months, we'll hit milestones around the way of where we want to be."
The technology suppliers for hotels also are making platform consolidation easier for smaller hotel chains. This month, for example, Micros announced it was launching an out-of-the-box version of its property management system, called Operetta, designed for independent hotels and chains with standard technology needs.
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