Pegasus To Roll Out Hotel Meetings Software
<FONT SIZE="+3"><B>Pegasus To Roll Out Hotel Meetings Software</B>
By Lauren Bielski
After a successful year-long beta test with three companies, hotel technology company Pegasus Systems will soon begin rolling out software that digitizes and shuttles meeting reservations data from planners to hotels-replacing the time-consuming manual processing of batch housing reservations.
Over the next year, Pegasus will introduce the product-developed by its subsidiary, THISCO (The Hotel Industry Switch Co.)-to the rest of its client base, and then offer it to housing bureaus and other organizations that make large-group reservations.
The beta testers-Hyatt Hotels Corp., International Travel Services and WorldTravel Partners-have spent the past year using the automated group booking system, called UltraRes, to provide rapid and error-free data entry.
"This has been a miracle product," said Julie Gildred, inventory manager at the Hyatt Woodfield, a major convention property in suburban Chicago. "At the volume and turnaround time we were working with, keying in all those numbers and keeping them straight was amazingly difficult. Hyatt has very specific lockout requirements regarding data, so UltraRes was the only product we considered. And the bottom line is that a process that used to take days can take 30 minutes or less."
The UltraRes system for automating meetings business and the UltraDirect system for the transient side (<I>BTN</I>, Nov. 25) are additional pieces to extend the original capabilities of the THISCO switch, which provides real-time availability and rates. Four CRSs-Sabre, Apollo, System One-Amadeus and Worldspan-are hooked up to 70 hotel chains under the THISCO umbrella, said director of product development Kathy Gutierrez-Burbank.
The booking software is designed to work with the company's "master switch" software that links the CRS systems used by travel agents to individual hotel inventories. A type of translation software that functions as a clearinghouse of information from multiple sources, the switch fills room requests by looking up the inventories of THISCO's participating hotels.
UltraRes takes the sting out of a time-consuming process. Instead of a travel agent, independent planner or housing bureau faxing a 100-page document of reservation requests and having hotel processors manually input names, addresses and credit card numbers, the reservationist uses the THISCO booking system to create an ASCII file that contains the information and sends it to the hotel in ready-to-use format. All that the agency and housing bureau need to participate is a booking system that can produce an ASCII file format.
The reservationist creates the message and shuttles it to the switch, which transfers it to UltraRes. The UltraRes software "peels apart" the booking message and recasts it in a digital form that mimics that created by the CRSs. Once data is shuttled to the hotel system, the software "directs requests to available slots" and automatically makes the booking without need for intervention. The software can automatically return a confirmation or an error code if there are problems or missing data.
So far, the glitches have been few, according to Hyatt and Pegasus. "We've had very successful beta tests," said Gutierrez-Burbank. The eight Hyatt properties that participated-including the 2,019 room-Hyatt Regency in Chicago-"felt the effects in a very dramatic way," she said. "They cut out monotonous jobs, saved money and reduced processing times from several days to, in the cases of the largest meetings, several hours."
UltraRes' power is multiplied by the breadth of hotel companies represented-virtually all major chains but Holiday Inn and Radisson are on board. "We really don't have competition at this point; no other technology firm has the reach to all those properties," Gutierrez-Burbank said.
Properties that are already involved with the THISCO global distribution system already have the setup to make use of UltraRes capabilities. The only requirement is that each property must load separate meeting and transient business rates into its reservation system. In many cases, properties only have transient rates and manually encode meeting rates as adjustments.