Improves Customer Service with Transaction Fee-Free Bookings |
November 6, 2003 - Alton Towers Hotel and its newly opened sibling,
Splash Landings Hotel, have both invested in the Ramesys multi site enterprise
PMS together with an integrated fee � free online reservations system that
is designed to improve customer service.
Alton Towers uses its website on all of its advertisements and heavily promotes the site as a way to gain park information. Park visitors can book park tickets via the website, and it seemed like a natural evolution to offer the same service for the hotels. The Ramesys e.res system provided the solution! The system has a 24-hour 7-day a week booking service that ultimately benefits the customer particularly when telephone lines are busy. When a customer makes a reservation, they simply use their credit card to secure the booking. They then receive an automatic email confirmation with all the details of the booking. The great thing about this system is that it does not charge booking fees, which many other online reservation systems impose on hotels. The tangible benefits for staff are a key consideration for many hotels. A proportion of hotels already offer online bookings via their website using a third party fee-based system. However the third party products often require hotels to allocate a number of rooms to the online system. This software experience is echoed by The Lakeside Hotel, an 80-bedroom hotel and conference venue situated on the picturesque banks of Lake Windermere, UK. The hotel enjoys a successful mix of both business and leisure tourism. The Lakeside Hotel was experiencing a significant increase in the number of enquiries being received by email. These ranged from availability requests to rate requests and were beginning to have an impact on the reservations team in terms of the labour intensive work generated by these enquiries. Staff would call or email clients back, but because of the volume there was an unacceptable delay for both the hotel and customers. The expectation was that as email inevitably continues to become an essential communication tool, the number of enquiries received by email would increase further making greater demands of staff. To resolve this, the Lakeside Hotel would have had to employ more staff, particularly enhancing the reservations team, but this would have sustained considerable expense. The most obvious solution was to explore the idea of online Internet bookings because it would alleviate the pressure on the staff in terms of workload and would provide a quicker service for customers. �Statistically, the results speak for themselves,� confirms Jonathan Robb, sales and marketing manager at the Lakeside hotel. �The Internet reservations system is much more streamlined than our old, manual process of dealing with enquiries. Since installation, the software has paid for itself nearly four times over because we now offer 24 �hour reservations for our customers all over the world,� he concluded. The appeal of Ramesys is that it provides real-time online Internet bookings working with live property management system availability. It does not involve a third party and therefore does not tie hotels into working on an allocation basis, nor does it carry transaction fees per booking. The hotels that move to the Ramesys solution can look forward to a system that brings an immediate impact internally in terms of employee productivity because staff no longer need to maintain allocations and rates on a separate third party system. It also means that reservation teams will no longer have to manually input resulting reservations, saving time, duplication of effort and eliminating room for error. Visit us at booth 3050 at the IH/M&R Show, Javits Center, NYC (Nov 8-11) to learn more about ImagInn, Entirety and our Telecom Solutions For more information: email [email protected] |
1 Cragwood Road, Suite 202 South Plainfield, New Jersey 07080 Tel: 908 941 1300
E-mail: [email protected]
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