| 17 Nov 1999 - Whitbread subsidiary Travel Inn, the UK�s favourite place
to stay - has invested over $1.6million (£1million) in a new Intranet
based Chain Management Solution (CMS) to be provided by London based Innsite
Hotel Services.
 The
new system will allow all the elements of Travel Inn�s booking system to
be linked to each other for the first time, with the potential to incorporate
the Central Reservations Service and more than 218 Travel Inns throughout
the UK. The Intranet will provide real time availability across all
the Travel Inns and allow effective cross-selling, centralized sales and
marketing and customer history collection.
Grant Hearn, managing director of Travel Inn, commented, �With the highest
average occupancy rate of any hotel chain in the UK, we are very excited
to be investing in a system which will allow us to sell the last room from
any of our Travel Inns. This is a crucial move if we are to achieve
our expansion objectives and remain the brand that more people choose to
stay in each night compared to any other.�
Travel Inn�s full order includes the CMS central reservations module,
Data General (DG) servers, Cache Database from Intersystems and training
and project management from Innsite. In addition, Innsite will be
implementing the CMS into the first 18 Travel Inns.
Tony Ferrari, Innsite managing director, added, �This order is central
to our strategy of building relationships with top hotel brands.
We are very pleased that Travel Inn has the confidence in our CMS concept
as being able to meet its requirements as part of its expansion.�
Travel Inn�s investment in the new reservations system follows the announcement
in October 1998 of £300 million expansion plans, aiming to double
the number of rooms to 20,000 by 2004. In April 1999, Travel Inn
revealed its new brand identity, and introduced the brand segment, Travel
Inn Metro, providing quality accommodation in the heart of the UK�s top
30 city centers and five key regional airports.
Innsite CMS
| Innsite�s CMS creates an enterprise-wide Intranet that links together
all hotels with head office to provide front desk, central reservations
office (CRO) and centralized guest history software. Users at each
hotel, for instance, access the central database via a web browser and
Windows based PCs. Innsite�s CMS provides the capability to allow
the CRO to sell the last room at each hotel on-line and in real time.
This avoids the need to operate a CRO in a �freesale� mode that has traditionally
restricted an organization�s ability to maximize sales.
It is known as a �third generation� product as it is a substantial advance
over discrete, hotel-centric property management systems (PMS) (�first
generation�) and interfaced CRO, PMS and overnight-polled data warehouse
(�second generation�) systems.
The software is based on a thin client/server architecture: the host
server operating system is UNIX or NT and operates on a range of hardware
platforms while client devices are PCs running Microsoft�s Internet Explorer
web browser. Innsite�s CMS is developed in the Caché database/rapid
application development (RAD) tool from InterSystems and offers Open Database
Connectivity (ODBC) access to all data for customer-generated reports,
data extracts and production of mailshots.
 Being
a client/server application minimizes cost of support, software maintenance
and upgrade costs. The architecture also avoids the use of site-based
fileservers and tape backup requirements, thus reducing hotel system administration
overheads.
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