Red Lion Centralizes Reservations

<H1>Red Lion Centralizes Reservations</H1><H2>Angus: Buyers don't need to talk to hotel</H2><H3>By Linda Humphrey</H3><I>Vancouver, Wash. </I>- Adding a twist to the concept of the seamless reservations system, Red Lion this fall will become the first hotel chain to handle all reservations from one central facility.

The chain's 55 properties-most of them company-owned-will shut down their reservations departments by Oct. 28, switching reservations calls to central agents and focusing instead on yield management.

This central takeover of reservations also has been picking up speed at Hyatt, which gives properties the option to forward calls to the central number. The clear benefit these hotel companies are seeking is to ensure rate consistency beyond what a single-image database can do. So far, Hyatt reports that centralized reservations have translated into consistently higher rates.

At Doubletree, about 30 to 40 percent of properties are forwarding a portion of their calls to its central res facility-a "substantial increase" over the past six months, said vice president of marketing Greg Malark. "As reservations systems become increasingly seamless, the cost advantages to the hotel to take bookings just through a centralized 800 number continue to make economic sense," he said.

Armed with "image banks" of photos, videos and maps-as well as a single-image database-central reservations agents can now field questions as well as their on-site counterparts can, hoteliers say.

"Training for the reservations office in hotels is often not top-notch," said Jeff Angus, Red Lion's vice president of sales and marketing. "It's also a relatively high turnover position. We will end up with a 24-hour staff specializing in taking reservations."

Polling its customers a few years ago, Red Lion found that talking directly to the hotel mattered only to 4 or 5 percent of them. "The great analogy for this is the airlines," Angus added. "You don't call San Jose to see if they have room to fly from LAX."

High-volume corporate customers still will have the option to deal directly with the property, Angus said, adding that the chain also plans to install its image bank terminals in the offices of key travel managers. Frequent travelers will gain a special 800 number, routing them to a group of designated, more-senior agents, Angus said.

The Internet will enhance this system as well, said consultant Michael Speer, president of Speer & Assoc. of North Hollywood, Calif. Red Lion plans to join TravelWeb's Internet site within a few months and to launch its own Web page this fall, offering online booking on both.

Red Lion's central reservations system, built on a platform developed by Anasazi Inc.-the Phoenix-based reservation systems provider for Choice, HFS, Loews and 20 other hotel chains-enables reservationists to click on menus as specific as "distance from the beach," corporate headquarters locations and highway exits. Central res agents will have an answer for almost every question-and will switch the handful they can't answer back to the property. Central agents will even handle group reservations, with the exception of rooming lists.

In place of the reservations position, Red Lion will bring revenue management experts on board at each hotel.

"The people on property will be working primarily with managing their inventory on a daily basis-tracking demand, the pacing, what inventories should be opened or closed-as opposed to managing reservations," Angus said.

The chain also is building some of the decision-support data for revenue management into its internally developed property management system. This piece of the operation is key, said Speer, as "the property has to feel it has control over its destiny, that it has some input over what's happening in central reservations."

Red Lion also just converted from WizCom to THISCO because Anazasi was one of the developers of THISCO. The chain also is checking into joining THISCO's HCC (Hotel Clearing Corp.) electronic commission payment and reconciliation system.

Hyatt and Doubletree, which have given their hotels the option to hand over reservations calls for the past several years, report that more hotels are clamoring for this service.

About 30 to 35 Hyatts have closed their reservations offices so far, and so many more want to jump on board that the chain can't grow its Omaha central res center fast enough to handle them, said Victor Vesnaver, assistant vice president of sales for Hyatt technology developer Regency Systems Solutions.

"Our hotels are finding that the central facility just does it better," Vesnaver said. "They have very specialized technology that is unaffordable at the local level."

Omaha is so chock-full of reservation and telemarketing centers, Vesnaver said, that the city's low unemployment makes finding employees a problem. "If we grow the center too fast, we're going to have a hard time staffing it," he said.

Instead, Hyatt is in the "embryonic stages" of launching regional reservations centers, Vesnaver said. A mini-res center in the Southeast, for example, would handle all the calls from that part of the world.

A central system does require a local person inputting local information such as citywide conventions, weather and new rooms coming online, according to Vensaver. "What the hotels have done is just outsourced to the central facility the tactical function of taking reservations over the phone," he explained.

While the latest single-image reservations systems ensure consistent rates between the property and central systems, the rates that get driven through the central system tend to be higher, Vesnaver said. An individual property is more willing to give discounts because it's more emotionally attached to the business.

In addition, he said, "the property management system doesn't have all the disciplines and controls that the central system has. The central system doesn't allow you to come down on rate as much."

Hyatt won't mandate a switchover, however, as the chain primarily is a management company.

"Closing down the res office could potentially make some owners a little nervous, in that all of a sudden their asset doesn't have a reservations department," Vesnaver said. In addition, he said that some properties also might find forwarding calls to a central office to be more expensive.