Discounted group inventory will be offered for participating Super 8®, Days Inn®, Ramada®, Travelodge®, Howard Johnson®, Knights Inn®, Wingate Inn® and AmeriHost Inn® franchised hotels. 

The agreement will ensure that retail group rates for Cendant-franchised hotel rooms are displayed prominently on groople.com, which caters to leisure group travel planners. 

Groople.com, an automated group booking system, gives travel planners the ability to plan, book and manage all aspects of their group trips online, including travel, hotel bookings and event planning.  Groople also hosts a call center to handle special requests and more complex needs including booking banquet facilities, registering for events and finding unique group activities.

Groople will enable Cendant lodging franchisees to check and manage group inventory on the Internet in response to their unique market needs.  �Best of all, our franchisees will be able to tap this potential revenue source at no additional cost,� said Bob Chafey, Cendant Hotel Group senior director of tour markets. 

�Groople helps us serve travel planners looking for a way to make group bookings faster and easier while providing our franchised hotels with a new way to increase their group business,� he said.  �We expect our clients will use Groople to book family reunions, military groups, sports teams and social groups.�

Groople Chief Executive Officer David Loy said the agreement �boosts the company�s inventory by nearly 60 percent and gives leisure travelers more options than ever before.�

�We're excited about partnering with Cendant because we share the same goals: to simplify group travel while providing the best rates,� he said. 

With approximately 90,000 employees, New York City-based Cendant Corporation (NYSE:CD) is primarily a provider of travel and residential real estate services to businesses and consumers in more than 100 countries.  Cendant�s Hotel Group, based in Parsippany, N.J., is the world�s largest lodging franchisor with 6,513 hotels representing 532,311 rooms on five continents under the Super 8®, Days Inn®, Ramada®, Travelodge®, Howard Johnson®, Knights Inn®, Wingate® and AmeriHost Inn® brands.  Cendant�s franchised hotels sell nearly one out of every five economy and midpriced room-nights in the United States, and Cendant franchises 10.4 percent of the entire U.S. hotel room supply, according to Smith Travel Research and Cendant financial data.  All hotels are individually owned and operated under franchise agreements with Cendant subsidiaries.

Evy Apostolatos
Senior Manager, Media Relations
Cendant Corporation, Hotel Group
(973) 496-0750
[email protected]