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. Charlotte, Cincinnati, Hartford, Ontario, Richmond, Toronto, Washington D.C., and Wildwoods Join the Passkey-enabledSM Network |
QUINCY, Mass. - February 19, 2004 - Greg Pesik, President and CEO of
Passkey International, Inc., announced today that 8 more Convention &
Visitors Bureaus (CVBs) have selected Passkey as their housing technology.
Charlotte (North Carolina), Cincinnati (Ohio), Hartford (Connecticut),
Ontario (California), Richmond (Virginia), Toronto (Canada), Washington
D.C., Wildwoods (New Jersey), will all be offering their meeting planners
Passkey to manage their events.
Passkey is setting the standard for managing group events, no matter what size or how complex. The primary reasons that more and more meeting destinations are implementing Passkey are to address their customers' need to fight attrition and control book-around challenges, to provide a user-friendly housing management tool and to deliver a consistent housing management process. With 85% of the major convention cities nationwide now Passkey-enabled, meeting planners are able to move from venue to venue without having to learn new processes as their event location changes. "Passkey is an industry acknowledged best-of-breed solution that we are thrilled to be deploying," said Bruce MacMillan, president and CEO of Tourism Toronto. "Clients will experience an enhanced level of service to improve their business. The implementation of Passkey is a part of our innovative 'Channel of First Resort' digital strategy." Meeting planners will continue to benefit from utilizing the same innovative Passkey solution from one city to another. Some of the benefits include their ability to have access to Passkey's collaborative, centralized event database, providing them accurate visibility 24/7 into how their meetings are materializing. Accessibility to real-time event booking data for planners, and an attractive, simple to use reservation vehicle for attendees, minimizes the incidence of attendees booking around group blocks. In turn, planners' exposure to attrition charges is minimized. Planners also have access to powerful tools for managing booking behavior and can customize event websites, offering attendees a complete hotel shopping experience including the ability to make, modify, or cancel reservations online and receive instant confirmations. Additionally, planners and participating hotels have the ability to run reports at anytime, further enhancing the communication between meeting planners, housing managers and event hotels. "Having these cities become Passkey-enabled is tremendous for us - the meeting planners," explained Colette Fairchild, trade show director of H.H. Backer Associates Inc. "Being able to use Passkey's robust group management tools from one city to another, makes my life so much easier, and I have more time to concentrate on other aspects to ensure the success of my event and the satisfaction of my attendees." Passkey is the premier web-based solution providing all parties involved in city-wide meeting and convention planning with real-time reports and updates at anytime. Its flexibility and power, for example, allows hotels to take advantage of unused blocks of rooms during a given event and provides all parties involved with a more efficient hotel booking process, as well as access to consistent, accurate information. "With each new Passkey-enabled venue, the ability for meeting planners to move easily from city to city becomes that much easier," says Paul Rantilla, Passkey's senior vice president of sales and marketing. "Given the numerous challenges that meeting planners already face, having a custom or site-specific housing technology just doesn't make sense. Meeting planners want the process consistency, and preservation of historical data that Passkey provides - no matter the location." Another significant benefit to cities and planners is Passkey RegLinkSM, which enables any registration system to seamlessly integrate with Passkey, a combination acknowledged to be the number one means of reducing book-arounds. Passkey's ability to integrate with the diversity of available registration solutions, whether proprietary or commercial, allows Passkey-enabled cities to offer this powerful tool for reducing attrition risk regardless of the registration tool a planner chooses to use. About Passkey International, Inc.
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Dahlia El Gazzar
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