Hilton Enhances Site

<B>Hilton Enhances Site</B>

By Bruce Serlen

Realizing that business travelers often have questions about hotels not necessarily addressed by currently structured hotel company Web sites, Hilton Hotels Corp. last month announced a Web enhancement to answer these frequency asked questions.

Working with Santa Clara, Calif.-based technology vendor Broad Daylight Inc., Hilton now has the ability to provide travelers with instant, accurate answers to their queries. "We needed a reliable search engine that not only could respond to search inquiries, but could actually answer specific questions," said Bruce Rosenberg, Hilton senior vice president for e-business and distribution.

For travel managers, the functionality is another step in ensuring that travelers choose a property in the hotel program that's most convenient in terms of location.

Increasingly, travel managers are giving hotels included in their programs the opportunity to have a link from the online booking tool directly to the hotel company Web site or the property-specific site. This will further encourage travelers to access these sites and then pose their FAQs before choosing the property for booking. Rosenberg said answers to the FAQs will be drawn automatically from a "sophisticated knowledge base" about Hilton properties being incorporated into the Web site.

For Hilton, the new technology represents both better-informed customers and a substantial cost saving. Since travelers typically call the call center to ask questions they can't get answered online, hotels have been incurring heavy call center administrative fees. Once the FAQs begin being addressed on the Web, Hilton estimated it will be able to reduce the size of its call center by 80 percent. In addition, each inquiry to the call center costs about $12, compared with about 25 cents for the electronic system.