Tech Directs Travelers On Road
<B>Tech Directs Travelers On Road</B>
By Bruce Serlen
Two new technologies, announced last month, will make it easier for travelers to get directions to the preferred properties in their hotel programs, thereby removing a potential obstacle to compliance.
To provide travelers with walking or driving directions to hotels and other business locations, BeVocal, a Santa Clara, Calif.-based voice portal provider, now has a toll-free 800 number operational in California, which will be available throughout the United States by September. Swissôtel Hotels & Resorts, meanwhile, launched a wireless application protocol system that allows travelers to get written directions to its 23 hotels worldwide from its Web site via WAP-enabled cell phones, pagers and personal digital assistants, such as Palm Pilots.
Online booking tools, such as GetThere.com's Global Manager and Sabre BTS, have included mapping features that allows travelers to see the exact location of hotels in relation to either the airport or where they had to conduct their actual business. By contrast, the new technologies are more portable. They're useful if travelers get lost, need a last-minute reminder or have an unexpected change of plans.
"Callers can access our services free-of-charge through any telephone, mobile or landline," said Amol Joshi, BeVocal's founder and vice president of marketing. "By speaking the requests for information into the phone, the system gives you turn-by-turn instructions that take you where you need to go."
The system will access directions to airports and restaurants as well as hotels. "We see a large demand for location-specific information and services," Joshi said.
The system works through a series of prompts that drill down for more specific information. "For example, by speaking the name of the hotel chain that the traveler knows is included in the company's hotel program, the system requests the traveler's location and then provides directions to the nearest property of that brand," he said.
Yet, not all searches are based on proximity. "You can get other options as well. The voice can give you the names of all a hotel chain's locations in a destination, not just the one closest to you," he said. While the service is free to the caller, fees are paid by the hotel chains and other businesses whose directions are included.
The turn-by-turn directions used by BeVocal were supplied by MapQuest, which also provided the software for the mapping feature on online booking tools, such as Sabre BTS. "When you think of how travelers navigated directions just five years ago, buying paper maps, we've seen a revolution," said Michael Nappi, vice president for business solutions at MapQuest.
"Given that the telephone can't accommodate a visual map, we've worked to adapt the technology to provide shorter texts that are more like thumbnail directions," he said. "We think of it more as information-on-the-go."
At various points in the BeVocal process, the voice will confirm the request by asking "Is this correct?" Similarly, if the location where the traveler is calling from is unclear, the voice will request a cross street. Should there be no cross street, the traveler is instructed to respond, "I don't know."
The system then will provide alternatives with the information that it has.
By the end of the year, the system will be updated to accommodate local landmarks in the request for directions, in addition to street addresses. "In New York, for example, you could say you were at Rockefeller Center and the system will be able to locate you," Joshi said.
Different functionalities are built into the system. "The voice will ask the caller to spell a name. And the caller can request that the search pause and then can instruct it to resume," he said. The traveler also is able to request that the information be repeated, if the directions are complicated in some way or are otherwise unclear.
When the system was being tested, Joshi said, paid testers were used in each state. "They worked the system hard and also included variations in pronunciation to ensure that the system could recognize regional accents," he said.
At Swissôtels, meanwhile, the travel directions and other information accessed from its Web site via the WAP-enabled cell phones and other handheld devices can be updated daily.
"It saves the traveler having to call the hotel concierge or use a laptop to access our Web site," according to Michelle Woodley, Swissôtel's vice president for distribution. "These typically are the ways travelers have obtained this information up to now."
On cell phones, for example, travelers activate WAP by pressing either "access Internet" or "okay" on the push pad. Travelers are charged connections similar to those of regular telephone calls. "In terms of this kind of technology, cellular Internet capabilities are expected to be the number-one trend over the next couple of years," said Oliver Bernet, Swissôtel's director of new technology.
For travel directions to a hotel, such as the Swissôtel Boston, the traveler could use WAP to find out that the property was three-and-a-half miles from Logan Airport, what a typical taxi fare would be from the airport and even what an appropriate amount of tip would be.
For budget travelers looking for an alternative to the taxi, the system provides shuttle bus and mass transit information, including fares and hours of operation. For travelers arriving by the mass transit rail system, walking directions from the exit closest to the hotel are included.
A similar degree of detail is available on the hotel and its various services, ranging from the executive floors to guest rooms dedicated to the business traveler to the restaurants, fitness center and indoor pool.
Swissôtels, which said it was the first hotel chain to conduct a worldwide rollout of WAP, estimated that approximately 10 percent of the 552 million wireless telephones in use today are Web-enabled. The number of wireless phones in circulation, however, is expected to swell to 900 million by 2003, with the percentage of them that are Web-enabled growing even more rapidly to 80 percent in that timeframe.