Hotel Online News for the Hospitality Executive Park Place Entertainment Enjoying Significant Growth in Online Room Bookings, Rates By Rod Smith, Las Vegas Review-Journal Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News
Jan. 13, 2002 – Spurred by rising room rates that have been boosted by online room reservation programs, Park Place Entertainment Corp. this week is launching all-new resort Web sites.
Park Place room rate increases generally have been leading other major Strip operators.
“This has been a one- to two-year phenomenon. We’ve had steady and significant growth in online room rates,” said Park Place Senior Vice President of Electronic Commerce Frank Han.
Among the big three Las Vegas operators, for example, only Park Place posted average weekday rate increases for the week ending Feb. 1, according to Bear, Stearns & Co. data.
“We’ve done a few things pretty well because our properties have embraced the medium. Consumers are saying the Internet works for travel, and Park Place has recognized that trend, giving them the inventory they want at attractive rates,” he said.
“It’s not rocket science. We’ve just been more aggressive with the channel so we’ve harvested more success,” Han said.
The average Park Place midweek rate for the week ending Feb. 1 is $134, up 3.2 percent compared with the year before, according to Bear, Stearns.
It also posted weekday rate increases in five of the previous six weekday periods.
Meanwhile, the average 2003 weekend Park Place rate for the week ending Feb. 1 was $265, up 7.1 percent compared with the prior year period.
The average weekday rate across the Strip is $119 for the week ending Feb. 1, down 11.8 percent compared with the year before when rates fell 3.6 percent.
The average weekend rate on the Strip for the week ending Feb. 1 is $195, down 21.1 percent compared with 2002.
Comparisons were difficult with the previous year when rates rose 9.8 percent because the Super Bowl was held Feb. 3, said Bear, Stearns analyst Jason Adder.
The launch of the new Park Place Web sites follows a year of substantial growth in Park Place’s online hotel room reservations in 2002, which explained a large portion of the company’s room rate performance.
At Park Place, hotel room reservations booked through resort Web sites in the first 11 months of 2002 increased 47 percent over the same period in 2001.
Room reservations booked through resort Web sites were up 156 percent over the first 11 months of 2000.
That does not include rooms booked online through third-party sites.
From January through November 2002, Park Place sold more than 393,000 room nights on Park Place sites.
At Paris Las Vegas, online reservations for the year 2002 made up 30 percent of its total “free and independent traveler” room segment.
For the week ending Feb. 1, the average midweek rate at Paris was $180, up 38 percent from 2002 and up 50 percent from 2001.
For the same period, the average weekend rate at Paris was $260, down 7 percent from a year ago, but even with 2001 rates.
This segment includes rooms available for individual public sale, excluding rooms blocked for casino invited guests, group business and other room blocks unavailable for individual public sale.
According to a 2001 study by PhoCusWright, the independent online travel research firm, hotel bookings on the Internet will grow to $6.7 billion this year.
Jupiter Media Metrix, an Internet monitoring firm, forecasts that online bookings will account for nearly 19 percent of all travel bookings by 2005, while PhoCusWright’s outlook is even higher, at 29 percent.
“For our casino resorts, we expect the new sites will drive faster growth in online reservations, which can significantly reduce costs while helping us build a better and longer-lasting relationship between the resort and its customers,” Han said.
The new sites, designed to make it easier to reserve rooms over the Internet, include easy-to-find reservation booking engines on each resort’s home page.
“We’ve upgraded the experience in a big way across numerous elements. The esthetics have been taken to best in class — a quantum leap in design and visual appeal,” he said.
“Second, we’ve upgraded accessibility and navigability,” Han said. The new sites are designed to be simple to operate and are consistent in design and navigation from one property to another.
Customers can now book rooms at any property from any site, can book amenities and can book multiple rooms, all at the same time, he said.
The sites also feature comprehensive information about resort attractions, online access to a wider variety of rooms, the chance to make multiple room reservations in single transactions, calendars that highlight dates when discounted rates are available, event and entertainment calendars and guest packages at many Park Place resorts.
“This new site architecture creates a platform for Park Place that will enable us to expand our Web marketing and customer relationship management initiatives. We’ll be doing a lot more on the Web,” Han said, including more packaging, managing relationships with customers and booking conventions and convention space.
Park Place Entertainment owns, manages or has an interest in 27 gaming properties operating under the Caesars, Bally’s, Flamingo, Grand Casinos, Hilton and Paris brand names with a total of approximately two million square feet of gaming space, 29,000 hotel rooms and 55,000 employees worldwide.
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