SOUTHLAKE, Texas August 31, 2010 – To take advantage of the growing number of visitors researching and booking travel online, Aqua Hotels & Resorts recently switched to Sabre Hospitality Solutions for its industry expertise and complete distribution solutions. This change has resulted in an amazing 38% increase in conversion rates on its Website since switching to the Guest Connect booking engine.
Sabre Hospitality Solutions’ Guest Connect booking engine powers Aqua’s website which lets visitors check availability across multiple properties throughout five Hawaiian Islands. The increase in conversions means the number of visitors to the booking engine that result in a booking has doubled since switching. This metric is critical to Aqua as it means visits to the booking engine that previously ended with a call to their central reservations office now end with an online booking instead. They have seen a significant shift to this direct channel as a result of a more intuitive and easy to use booking engine.
“Visitors to our website have found our new booking engine very easy to use as evidenced by the huge increase in conversions, bookings and revenue. We’ve found the multi-step booking process to be a big factor in the usability as consumers are familiar with this way of shopping,” said Elizabeth Churchill, VP Sales & Marketing, Aqua Hotels & Resorts. “Another huge benefit of switching to Guest Connect has been a decrease in calls with online booking questions to our central reservations office. Guests are now comfortable completing the entire booking online.”
This all translates to a 30 percent increase in website bookings, and as a result of Guest Connect’s many merchandising capabilities, revenue from this online channel has grown 41 percent. In addition to Guest Connect, Aqua uses Sabre Hospitality Solutions’ SynXis Central Reservation System (CRS) to distribute its inventory to all channels including the four global distribution systems (GDS), online travel agents (OTA) and to its own reservation call center using Voice Agent.
“Aqua Hotels & Resorts is a great example of a customer that is taking full advantage of Sabre Hospitality’s full range of solutions and seeing the benefits,” commented David Meltzer, senior vice president sales for Sabre Hospitality Solutions. “Our team of experts really focus on helping customers use our technology to increase revenue opportunities, save on costs and improve customer service and we are looking forward to future successes with the team at Aqua.”
About Sabre Hospitality Solutions
Sabre Hospitality Solutions leverages the strength and breadth of Sabre Holding’s technology, internet marketing and distribution tools to bring hotel suppliers a global end-to-end solution. Sabre’s hospitality expertise and portfolio of solutionshas grown significantly over the last several years and now includes SynXis, whichprovides distribution technology and marketing services; E-site Marketing, the leading hospitality Internet marketing solutions provider; Sabre Hotels GDS; Sabre Hotel RFP, which develops, delivers and manages hotel requests for proposals into a single organization; and Sabre Media Solutions for GDS and other creative services in hospitality. For more information visit http://www.sabrehospitality.com/.
Sabre Holdings connects people with the world’s greatest travel possibilities by retailing travel products and providing distribution and technology solutions for the travel industry. More information is available at http://www.sabre-holdings.com/.
Sabre Hospitality Solutions:
Carol Levitt
Director, Marketing & Communications
+1-682-605-3614
Carol.levitt@sabre.com
