Radisson Survey To Spur Development Of Tech Products
<H1> Radisson Survey To Spur Development Of Tech Products</H1>By Lauren Bielski
<B>R</B>adisson Hotels is using the results of its recent survey on meeting planners' use of technology to guide technology services development at its properties-including the development of a World Wide Web site.
The survey of about 500 planners, conducted last fall during a series of company training seminars and published in March, showed that a significant number of "first-wave adopters" are getting more sophisticated about technologies like CD-ROM and e-mail, and have incorporated them into their workday routines. The Internet is just beginning to replace the telephone for more routine, preliminary inquiries about menus and other specifications.
Far from being technophobic, the average planner is looking to replace paper-intensive procedures with virtual communication. More than 40 percent of those surveyed work with a 486-type computer, with 72 percent using a Windows operating system. As their comfort level and use increases, said Radisson's executive vice president of operations Paul Hanley, his company wants to bring the site selection and request for proposal processes into the 21st century.
With those findings in mind, Radisson is redoubling its efforts to develop a version of its CD-ROM property listings for multimedia-a storage medium that many of its planners are equipped to use.
With the survey, "we hoped to gauge attitudes and needs for the future," Hanley said. "The results support our decision to offer a CD-ROM collection of properties and to develop WWW sites."
The CD-ROM will include photos, video and complex graphic information. "We realize that many planners are familiar with a location but may need updated specifications on a particular banquet hall or meeting room," Hanley said. "If they are generally comfortable with a property but need some visual cues to refresh their memory, a graphic CD-ROM is the perfect tool." The multimedia version should be available in early 1997.
About 70 of Radisson's 320 properties already boast Web-style sites on marketplaceMCI, a service that allows e-mail booking and requests for proposal submission. While the existing sites are not yet fully interactive-and therefore do not allow planners remote access to hotel systems from their personal computers-they have facilitated faster planner-response times, Hanley noted.
To complete a request for proposal, for example, a planner fills out an electronic version of a standardized form and e-mails it in. Radisson personnel than process the requirements and either telephone, fax or e-mail a response.
The only Radisson property on the World Wide Web, the Radisson Miyako in San Francisco, has been phenomenally successful (Meetings Today, Feb. 26). The hotel's one-stop-shop approach generates about 100 hits per day and offers four RFP categories: general information, rate information, group history and conference data. Radisson is putting together a comprehensive, "mall"-style World Wide Web site, scheduled to premier later this spring, with multiple property listings and much more comprehensive interactivity, including the ability to book a reservation in real time, said director of interactive marketing Rachael Marret.
While the upcoming sites will be uniform, many locations have expressed an interest in building and customizing their own sites, Hanley said.
He noted that with 23 percent of meeting planners equipped with CD-ROM drives and 20 percent using e-mail, the survey findings support a multiphase approach to high-tech services. "With shorter time frames in the meeting planning process, the tools that are in the most demand in the first wave of technology adoption are eliminating typical bottlenecks such as phone tag," Hanley said. Planners also want technology to be relatively affordable and easy to incorporate into existing procedures, he said.
Anecdotal evidence Hanley has gathered indicates that many planners are beginning to use faster and more powerful modems, a prerequisite for the downloading of multimedia data from a Website."I can't say how quickly the demand for this technology will materialize," he said, "but given our history of embracing some of the most progressive reservation systems out there, we'll be prepared.