Developed specially for the European hotel chain,  Sol Meliá's  own private computerised global distribution and central reservation system SolRes works in conjunction with the Company's world-wide sales and reservations network consisting of 35 sales offices in 18 countries.  With connections to all of the major Global Distribution Systems, including Amadeus, Galileo, Sabre, and Worldspan,  SolRes provides direct access to more than 550,000 terminals  in over 100,000 travel agencies world-wide.

The SolRes network also allows the 40 million internet users real-time access to the reservation systems of each of Sol Meliá's 250 hotels in 30 countries, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.  In response to the increasing demand, Sol Meliá has incorporated an intelligent digital distribution and routing system able to handle more than 160,000 operations per hour.

The SolRes central reservations systems is connected on-line with virtually all of Sol Meliá's 250 hotels and 35 international sales offices world-wide.  All calls from travel agents or individual customers are centralised through the offices in Madrid and automatically channelled to the correct reservations agent according to language or market specialisation.

SolRes provides a cost effective and reliable reservations system which has reduced the response time for bookings of Sol Meliá rooms to an average of 5 seconds each.

According to Mr Ron Roy, Sol Meliá's Vice President for Sales and Marketing, the system was developed as a direct response to the ever increasing growth in market demand with the aim to improve the efficiency of the group's response to customers' needs and to provide easy access to the bookings of  the Group's international properties.

He said : "As an international chain that is undergoing a rapid period of expansion and consolidation world-wide, Sol Meliá is very conscious of the need to make itself more and more accessible to its customer base.  In doing so, it is imperative that we are in tune with new developments in modern technology  and communications, with a commitment to an ongoing process of upgrading and improving our own systems and standards of service."

Sol Meliá's Reservation Technology Training and Development also provides travel agents with courses on using GDS systems, an initiative which assisted in doubling the efficiency and productivity of the SolRes system in 1998.

Sol Meliá, Europe's leading hotel group and the ninth largest hotel company in the world, has a portfolio of 250 city and resort hotels in 30 countries under the brand names of Meliá, Sol and Paradisus hotels.  Its properties in Asia include Gran Meliá Jakarta, Meliá Bali (incorporating The Garden Villas), Meliá Benoa (Bali), Sol Lovina (Bali), Meliá Purosani (Yogyakarta), Meliá Panorama (Batam), and Sol Elite Marbella (Anyer) in Indonesia; Meliá Hanoi in Vietnam; Meliá Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia; Meliá Hua Hin and Sol Twin Towers (Bangkok) in Thailand.