Siegel Sez – UPDATE THIS ! February 4, 2000 – Issue #12 T E C H N O L O G Y NEWSTAND by Jon Inge Squire.com by Michael Squires 
Hospitalitys Location for Automation T E C H N O L O G Y NEWSTAND by Jon Inge Squire.com by Michael Squires Hospitalitys Location for Automation I always wonder if I am stretching the limits here when I share my stories. Recently, I had lunch with Elastic Networks and toward the end of lunch, one of the women asked what was happening with the “Eighth Ave. gal.” I just laughed. I asked her what she thought of my opening to the bi-weekly Siegel Sez via Hotel-Online. She laughingly said, “The chicks love it.” Hmmm. Interesting. The next week I had dinner with a small gathering from the Eltrax Hospitality Group. Siegel Sez came up in the conversation and the comment directed at me from one of the guys regarding the opening was, “Oh yea, Rich, we love reading about your sex life.” Again I laughed. Talk about two different views from each gender. But, as silly as it can be (and embarrassing), it seems like most everyone is reading it. So, with that said, here it goes.
So about a week or so ago I got “fixed up” with some woman that recently moved to Atlanta. We met at a restaurant for a drink and possibly dinner (I think we were both being cautious about making to big a commitment to a blind date). I was at the bar waiting and when she finally arrived, my jaw dropped. This gal was an exact look-a-like (and I mean exact) of a woman that was a very good friend of mine (and let me stress, just friends!!!) when I lived in Dallas in the mid-eighties. I know people say that we all have a double somewhere in the world, but this was definitely my friend’s double. I can’t mention my friend’s name because she is kind of a big shot in the hotel industry, but if I can keep this dating thing going with this gal, maybe I can get her to go to Dallas with me for HITEC. I know my big shot friend will be there so I think it would be a riot to see them look at each other for the first time. If this happens, they will both probably think that I am nuts, but I don’t think I am wrong this time. If my new Atlanta friend will go to HITEC with me (June is a long ways off when it comes to my dating) then I will take pictures of them both and you can tell me if I am right or not. I will tell you this, the end of my date was very strange, but we will save that for later.
Speaking of Dallas, Michael will be representing us at the upcoming Strategic Conference on Lodging Operations & Technology for the New Millenium (that is a mouthful), which is being presented by Lodging Hospitality Magazine and KPMG. It is being held Feb 20-22 at the Hotel Adolphus, which in my book is one of the more beautiful hotels in the world. They have lined up some real “heavyweights” in the industry to speak and moderate at this conference. Sixteen interactive sessions will be offered over the two-day conference covering four topics: Human Resources and Labor; Sales, Marketing and Customer Management; Procurement and Supply Chain Management; Internet and Technology. If you would like more information regarding this conference, please call Bobbi Moran at (216) 931-0706.
Okay, here now is the news. I will see you at the end with this week’s attempt at humor.
Technology N E W S T A N D A Summary of Systems News Compiled by Jon Inge [email protected]
Top o’ The News
E-commerce set to soar – You can’t help reading about e-commerce these days, and with good reason; the benefits are huge. Michael Squires commented in the last newsletter on the widespread impact of the Internet, and further evidence comes from the mix of news stories this time around; take a look at the activity under “Reservations” and “Purchasing” below. We’ve been familiar with Internet reservations and travel sites for some time – though the growth in wireless-device connectivity is recent – but the increase in Purchasing activity is very noticeable.
Some of the main reasons for the surge in interest in e-purchasing come from a recent report by the Aberdeen Group. According to this Boston-based Internet research organization, online purchasing provides real saving benefits. Administrative costs are reduced up to 90 percent, inventory costs up to 25-50 percent, and purchasing costs 15-25 percent or more by eliminating off-contract purchases and improving processing efficiencies. The hotel community currently spends $107 billion on procurement expenditures annually – and this can only increase as more companies discover the real value of the Internet.
PEOPLE ON THE MOVE
Eltrax Systems, Inc. named John Butler president of its Customer Care business unit. Mr. Butler was a long-time officer of Encore, and was most recently Chief Operating Officer and President of its implementation arm Global Systems and Services, Inc. (GSSI). James Gandy, formerly Vice President of Operations for Eltrax’s hospitality division, has been named Vice President of Business Development and Sales Support for Customer Care.
Northwind has appointed John Dowsett as the Director of Sales for Canada and the Caribbean. Mr. Dowsett spent ten years in management operations with the Four Seasons Hotel Toronto and for the past ten years was positioned in sales & marketing on property and Corporate Office with Winfair Hospitality Ltd.
PROPERTY MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS
MAI’s Hotel Information Systems (HIS) division has announced Paragon+, an enhanced version of its Paragon AS/400 Property Management System, which adds a browser-based user interface to the unchanged core AS/400 application. Additionally, Paragon+ gives users single-button Internet access and seamless integration with desktop applications such as Microsoft Office. Paragon+ was built with J Walk, a development tool from Netherlands-based Seagull Software that adds e-business functionality to AS/400 applications.
RESERVATIONS
Expedia, Inc. has acquired two leading players in the Internet lodging industry, Travelscape.com, Inc. and VacationSpot.com, Inc., bringing its availability database to 65,000 properties worldwide. Travelscape.com brought over 1,200 hotels in 240 cities worldwide with its Travelscape.com and LVRS.com (Las Vegas Reservations Systems) websites. VacationSpot.com added over 25,000 vacation home, rental condo, inn and bed & breakfast properties from its VacationSpot.com and Rent-a-Holiday.com websites.
Hotelguide.com has released its wireless-access hotel directory for WAP-enabled (Wireless Application Protocol) mobile phones. The directory currently covers 60,000 hotels in 200 countries; WAP phone users can locate a hotel and place a call to its reservation desk with a push of a button. Hotelguide.com recently contracted with wireless services providers Swisscom in Switzerland and SUNDAY in Hong Kong.
Scandic Hotels, Scandinavia’s biggest hotel chain, has started a hotel booking WAP service for members of its Scandic Club, using Nokia supplied equipment and Nokia’s expertise in building the service. Scandic Hotels has 131 hotels in 10 countries.
Saraide, a provider of Internet-based services to wireless devices, is teaming with Travelocity.com to deliver real-time flight information to users of any wireless device, such as pagers, mobile phones and PDAs. Wireless carriers offering the new service will enable their users to receive customized travel itinerary updates for tickets are purchased through Travelocity.com.
Passkey.com Inc. unveiled air and car reservation services from Sabre. The services will be integrated with its Internet-based group hotel reservation system for the meetings and convention industry. The service also is available through its call center.
In announcing its year-end financial results, Pegasus Systems reported that its 4th quarter 1999 Internet bookings increased 165% over 1998; for the full year, Pegasus processed over 2.1 million online reservations, compared to 750,000 in 1998.
Sales.com, a website aimed at sales professionals, is adding custom 24/7 travel services under a partnership with Rosenbluth Interactive division biztravel.com. The travel service will provide Sales.com’s registered users with travel information, custom-tailored booking capabilities and one-on-one telephone and instant messaging capabilities with Rosenbluth International’s customer service staff.
Leisure lodging travel network inntopia.com has signed a cross-promotional agreement with hospitality information provider Lanier Publishing International. LPI will provide co-branded content for the inntopia.com Web site; inntopia.com will add its real-time booking engine to the Lanier site and its partner properties. www.travelguides.com, www.unexplored.com
European travel specialist ebookers.com has been chosen for a pilot program with online audio site Virgin Radio, the first European radio station to broadcast continually on the Internet. The agreement provides ebookers.com with prominent logo/website link placement on the Virgin Radio site, plus 10-second audio commercials.
Priceline.com is taking it’s name-your-price strategy to Asia through an alliance with Hong Kong-based conglomerate Hutchison Whampoa Limited. The agreement covers China, India, Taiwan, Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam, but not Japan. Hutchison Whampoa is one of Asia’s largest owners and operators of Internet and telecommunications infrastructure services. A new company will be created and funded by both parties to launch and manage the Asian Name-Your-Own-Price service. Priceline.com will license its business model to the new company and contribute its expertise in technology, marketing and operations; Hutchison will leverage its extensive customer base and retail network in Asia, global data center capabilities, local supplier contacts, management expertise and a rapidly developing Internet platform.
SALES & CATERING, MEETING PLANNING
Newmarket International will hold its first annual Delphi User’s Conference from March 22-24 at the Opryland Hotel in Nashville, Tenn. Newmarket will also unveil its eCommerce strategy for 2000, including MeetingBroker.com, a Web-based service that allows Delphi to receive leads from a wide range of Internet distribution channels, including meeting planner RFP sites.
POINT OF SALE/ACTIVITY TRACKING
MICROS Systems has been selected by Earls Restaurants of North Vancouver, BC, to install its Restaurant Enterprise Series (RES) solution in all new installations. RES consists of MICROS’ 3700 POS System and its Enterprise Management corporate database administration and reporting package, which centrally manages and controls restaurant-level databases for both POS and management applications. Earls Restaurants currently owns or operates more than 70 restaurants, and has expansion plans throughout Canada, the United States and Europe.
GUEST SERVICES
Liberty Digital, Inc. subsidiary DMX MUSIC announced the availability of its in-room music service to luxury hotels and resorts through its new SoundStay division. SoundStay will provide DMX MUSIC’s non-stop, CD-quality, commercial-free music to guestrooms 24-hours a day, using a variant of the high-quality Bose Professional Wave radio customized for hotels and resorts. The radio has built-in software that allows hoteliers to customize settings for their property, including a maximum volume setting, an expiring alarm and a one-touch remote for housekeeping personnel that restores all radio settings.
Bass Hotels & Resorts will deploy interactive Grapevine data/telephone network terminals from Elcotel, Inc. in all its 230 properties in Canada, including Inter- Continental, Crowne Plaza, Holiday Inn, Holiday Inn Express and Staybridge Suites by Holiday Inn. Each property will have up to 10 Grapevine terminals installed; the Grapevine unit combines traditional payphone capabilities with sponsor-paid advertising and content, e-commerce and personalized information services from the Internet in a public access setting.
Wyndham International, Inc. has signed Wayport, Inc., as its exclusive Internet services provider for hotel guest rooms, meeting rooms and public areas. By mid-year, Wyndham plans to have fast, convenient Internet services (including wireless connections in meeting rooms and public areas) accessible in nearly 200 properties and 50,000 rooms in the U.S., the Caribbean and Canada.
Guestlink International Ltd. is offering a combination Internet-TV product in Europe, combining PC/Internet picture quality with broadband speed to every room that allows hotel guests to watch TV whilst surfing the net. It has signed a European distribution agreement with Telenor Vision International AB and VMS Visual Media Services, both specialists in film and other content distribution and currently supplying more than 80.000 hotel rooms. The operating areas will cover Austria, Benelux, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Portugal, Spain and Sweden.
BACK OFFICE
Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide has chosen SAP implementation partner Delphi Consultants LLC to implement the SAP Human Resources solution for all its hotels, which include Sheraton, Westin, The Luxury Collection, St. Regis, W, and Four Points. SAP HR is a component of the mySAP.com Internet business suite. The project involves combining and converting third-party payroll processors, primarily ADP and Ceridian, to SAP HR for Starwood’s approximately 52,000 U.S. employees. Delphi also will work with Starwood to streamline master data processing and organizational management.
PURCHASING
La Quinta has extended its agreement with Computron Software in a $1.8 million contract as part of La Quinta’s corporate goal of becoming completely paperless by mid-2000. The first step towards implementing Computron’s TransAXS Procurement product will be the implementation of Computron’s Business Process Solutions, which automates purchasing and payables; TransAXS adds Internet purchasing to the range.
Wyndham International has named SYSCO Corporation as its preferred provider of food and food distribution services throughout the United States and the Caribbean; earlier Wyndham strategic procurement agreements have covered in-room entertainment, waste management and travel planning. Effective immediately, Wyndham International will convert its food purchasing operations in the U.S. and the Caribbean to SYSCO’s proprietary Internet-based system, eSYSCO.
Wyndham also awarded Florida-based GoCo-op, Inc. a contract to develop and implement a comprehensive online procurement system for its 300 hotels and resorts to conduct their purchasing via the Internet. GoCo-op will create a customized private online procurement system, host the system on its servers, provide training, and make the system available to each of Wyndham’s owned, leased, managed and franchised hotels. The system is scheduled to be operational April 2000, and will enable Wyndham hotel staff to buy operating supplies, equipment and services from thousands of approved suppliers. The new GoCo-op online system will be integrated seamlessly with Wyndham’s SAP enterprise resource system, enabling various departments to coordinate accounts payable, purchase orders, goods receivables, and other functions.
Guest Supply, Inc. is creating an e-commerce portal for Internet sales of its housekeeping and other lodging industry operating supplies and its consumer health and beauty aid products, as well as the products and services of other vendors. The new site (www.guestsupply.com) will use GoCo-op, Inc.’s hosted Procura solution. Guest Supply will also have exclusive rights to market its core product line on Hotel Co-op.com, and preferred marketing rights on Restaurant Co-op.com and Healthcare Co-op.com, three portal communities presently operated by GoCo-op Inc.
Hotelworks.com subsidiary Parker Reorder Online announced its 150th customer, the 88-room Avalon Hotel in Beverly Hills, originally built in 1949 as the Beverly Carlton Hotel and once the home of both Marilyn Monroe and Mae West.
hsupply.com announced the successful implementation of The Stonebridge Marketplace, its first customized e-procurement marketplace for hospitality supplies. Developed for Stonebridge Companies, a Denver- based hotel management company, the site provides a centralized hub for the requisition, ordering and fulfillment needs of Stonebridge’s 29 managed hotels, which operate under 11 hotel brands in five Western states. The online marketplace includes brand-specific interfaces featuring products and supplies that meet the various hotel brands’ standards and requirements, and incorporates pre-negotiated pricing agreements between the management company and its suppliers. Online order flow is tailored to reflect Stonebridge’s established internal approval and routing processes for orders and invoices.
Squires.com by Michael Squires [email protected] Two cool technologies arrived in UPDATE’s offices this week—and neither had a dot-com attached to its name.
One is designed for foodservice but destined to find wide implementation, and the other is a welcome PBX innovation.
MicroTouch, a developer of touch screen technology for foodservice, announced a partnership with AEGIS Environments that will allow MicroTouch to begin bonding the AEGIS Microbe Shield antibacterial agent to touch screen monitors of all kinds. MicroTouch’s new CleanScreen ™ provides antibacterial protection from microorganisms and bacteria. It is reported to be an effective, durable coating that improves the hygiene of public access devices such as ATMs, video games, kiosks, medical and foodservice applications. Most POS systems and kitchen monitors can readily benefit from this advance. AEGIS’ antibacterial technology, already be found in medical products, is permanently bonded to the screen’s surface to provide protection for the life of the touch screen.
Not to be outdone, Mitel announced the spring rollout of its new speech recognition PBX system, Speak@Ease. The hotel version of its new product will enable guests to use conversational speech in the language of their choice to perform tasks such as managing temporarily assigned mailbox messages or inquiring about meetings. The other applications for this technology are pretty neat too how many times have you had to take the phone away from your ear to push buttons so you could pick up voice mail or navigate a company’s answering system?
Back to Siegel SEZ
Okay, here is this week’s attempt at humor. The next time you hear from me via Hotel-Online will be in two weeks and I will probably be sitting in my hotel room in Switzerland on my birthday (trying not to be depressed) while attending EURHOTEC, the European Hotel Technology conference. I will let you know how that show is going while over there.
A Highway Patrolman waited outside a popular local bar, looking for a bust. At closing time, as everyone came out, he spotted his potential quarry. The man was so obviously inebriated that he could barely walk. He stumbled around the parking lot for a few minutes, looking for his car. After trying his keys on five other cars, he finally found his own vehicle.
He sat in the car a good ten minutes, as the other patrons left. He turned his lights on, then off, wipers on, then off. He started to pull forward into the grass, and then stopped. Finally, when he was the last car, he pulled out onto the road and started to drive away.
The patrolman, waiting for this, turned on his lights and pulled the man over. He administered the Breathalyzer test, and to his great surprise, the man blew a 0.00.
The patrolman was dumbfounded. “This equipment must be broken!” exclaimed the patrolman.
“I doubt it,” said the man, “Tonight, I’m the Designated Decoy!
***********see ya in two weeks*********** [email protected]
A Highway Patrolman waited outside a popular local bar, looking for a bust. At closing time, as everyone came out, he spotted his potential quarry. The man was so obviously inebriated that he could barely walk. He stumbled around the parking lot for a few minutes, looking for his car. After trying his keys on five other cars, he finally found his own vehicle.
He sat in the car a good ten minutes, as the other patrons left. He turned his lights on, then off, wipers on, then off. He started to pull forward into the grass, and then stopped. Finally, when he was the last car, he pulled out onto the road and started to drive away.
The patrolman, waiting for this, turned on his lights and pulled the man over. He administered the Breathalyzer test, and to his great surprise, the man blew a 0.00.
The patrolman was dumbfounded. “This equipment must be broken!” exclaimed the patrolman.
“I doubt it,” said the man, “Tonight, I’m the Designated Decoy!
UPDATE Magazine Geneva Rinehart 3200 Windy Hill Road Suite 400 West Atlanta, GA 30339 770.953.2300 TEL 770.953.2309 Fax [email protected]