Hi, my name is Joao Trindade and I’m with GuestCentric’s Marketing department. I’m stoked to present to you our new website.

For the last year or so we’ve been collecting feedback from customers and website visitors, trying to understand their needs and doubts. What we realized was that in most cases there’s a great lack of understanding on some fundamentals about how the online channel works and the significance of its rapid evolution.

The first glimpse we had regarding this subject was around 8 months ago when we finished the “The Online Gap Report“. This report clearly showed that concerning the online channel, there is a wide gap between the independent hotels and the big chains; most of it caused by this lack of information I’ve just mentioned above.

With this website we are aiming to provide a better service for independent hoteliers and offer you valuable information about the “whys” and “how-tos” of this always evolving online travel market - and we will break it down into numbers. In these uncertain economic times, numbers are more important than ever, as hoteliers seek to ensure their return on investment (yes; the infamous “ROI”).

Most of all, we want to show you how our stalwart one-stop-shop service, with website design, secure hosting, booking engine, reservation platform and hotel marketing can help you boost your business like it did for Hotel Aiken, who continue to increase their direct online bookings by the day and are thus a prominent example of our customers’ success stories.

Our blog was designed as our main source of communication to all of you, so you’ll be able to choose from different categories to help you find the information you’re looking for. Starting January, we will also launch a series of webinars to help you on topics related to website design, yield management, and much more - so stay tuned!

Most of all, we want to continue to receive your feedback, so don’t be a stranger and contact us!

PS. We will also continue to post our videos on our YouTube channel, so make sure to check those out.

This great new article just came out on The Advocate (Stamford) by Michael C. Juliano and he goes right to the point. Check it out:

Making it to the top of the hotel chain: Area company helps with reservations, marketing

A local marketing firm is offering a cost-effective way for smaller hotels to incorporate online booking and marketing services, enabling them to compete with larger chains.

GuestCentric, a Stamford-based online hospitality software as a service provider, has created a Web site allowing independent hotels to manage online and offline bookings. On the site, hotel managers also can keep track of online performance and market their hotels on the Internet.

Pedro Colaco, GuestCentric’s president and chief executive officer, said he realized two years ago that independent hotels were using outdated booking software with no access to the online market.

“Their problem is really distribution,” said Colaco, who co-founded the company in 2006 with vice president Filipe Machaz. “This is about giving the small guys the ability to compete with the big guys at a reasonable price.”

Within two weeks of using GuestCentric, online bookings for South Carolina’s Hotel Aiken, which uses other Web services such as expedia.com, had doubled from 25 to 55 reservations per week, said Lindsey Wise, the hotel’s sales coordinator.

“We’re getting at least one reservation a day from GuestCentric,” she said.

Bookings at the 64-room hotel have increased dramatically with GuestCentric because people can make reservations on the hotel’s Web site, said Wise.

“This makes our Web site more user-friendly,” she said.

According to its Web site, GuestCentric’s rates vary from $70 per month to $500 per month.

GuestCentric, which has offices in Portugal and the United Kingdom and less than 100 clients, plans on marketing its service by calling hotels, Internet promotion and holding presentations across the United States and Europe, Calaco said.

“We believe the smaller hotels are community-based,” he said.

Susan Henrique, director of sales and marketing for the Norwalk Convention & Visitors Bureau, said GuestCentric offers a very inexpensive alternative for small hotels trying to get online business.

“This is a definite plus for hotels and inns,” she said, adding that developing an independent Web site can cost thousands of dollars. “If I were filling hotels as an independent, I’d certainly look at this.”

Writer Michael C. Juliano can be reached at michael.juliano@scni.com or 964-2417.

Using highly scientific methods of observation, I’ve discovered that 92% of hoteliers will ask “How much will it/does it cost?” within 56 seconds of a first time conversation. This is a valid concern these days. Understandably, in the current economic climate few business owners are looking to increase their bills but even fewer can afford to miss the opportunity to increase revenue and exposure. GuestCentric’s revolutionary platform includes a sophisticated, professionally designed website, a real time booking engine and a backend management system that will provide oodles of useful information in a format that rivals paint-by-numbers in the user friendly department with the even friendlier condition of NO start up or set up fee. After doing some more rogue research I found that, for most hotels, one to two room bookings per month pays for our sensibly-priced-no-contract service and then some.
This is, of course, after having taken it for a free test drive first. So, with a free trial to give you a head start on getting some commission free bookings followed by pricing that offers instant return on investment – how can you lose? In today’s economic climate and online environment we could all use more services that not only pay for themselves but generate more virtual attention and real business.

Deirdre Knowlton
Senior account manager
+1 203 883 9830
Contact me online

Hi, I am Filipe Tappenbeck VP of Product Management. I would like to share with you the good news about the release of GuestCentric’s Fall ‘08 Platform. Best part of all, the service is available for everyone!

There were some exciting updates and new features added to our service that will make your life easier. Among other new features and updates you will find:

Updated booking engine
The updated booking engine provides guests a unique shopping experience where they can shop for promotions, last minute specials and adjust their budget using filter options.

Stay restrictions and cancellation policies
Conditions and restrictions for promotions can be set up to allow customization of offers including early bookings, last-minute specials, weekend getaways etc

Tripadvisor direct-connect

Integrate Tripadvisor user reviews in your hotel website site and benefit from guest reviews.

‘Export to excel’ feature
From now on you can analyze your guests and reservations offline, just use the ‘export to excel’ to create a spread sheet of your records.

Learn more about GuestCentric or subscribe to get your 30 day free trial

After many hours of usability testing, we are delight to announce the introduction of an Interactive Dashboard to your GuestCentric Platform. The dashboard is a marketing performance tool design specifically for independent properties like yours to easily track the effectiveness of your website, to know what kind of information your customers search for and what is needed to convert visitors into customers.

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In the interactive dashboard you will be able to find information like:

- Graphs showing daily number of visits

- Number of unique visitors

- Time spent on each page

- Visitor statistics by country

- Detailed information on the booking engine interaction

- Real-time information on total revenue generated

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You will also get weekly tips on how to improve online revenue and visibility through the usage of your GuestCentric Platform.

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We are sure this new feature will meet all your expectations and needs. Let us know what you think, send us your comments.

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Sign up for a 30 Day Free Trial and see how in less than a month your website will generate outstanding results.

Hi, my name is Pedro Gomes and I am GuestCentric Product Manager. Part of my job is to make sure things run smoothly for our customers and what a better way to know when this is accomplished than to receive enthusiastic feedback about the service. Over a month ago Mr. Gallego an independent hotel owner signed up for GuestCentric’s free trial. He is not what one could call a tech savvy person.

Recently I received news from him; he finished setting up his website, he was extremely proud of the results and very satisfied with how easy the entire process was. Using GuestCentric’s InstantHotel Technology which was developed specifically for hotels, he was able to create a professional looking website, from scratch, by himself in less than a week. He was surprised on how easy it was to develop the right menus structure and to populate the pages with content.

InstantHotel Technology helped Mr. Gallego developing content easily as it uses all the information added to the system to populate the website pages. He was especially pleased on how good his amateur pictures looked on the flash banners. He finished the page by adding some of the available gadgets like Google maps and picture gallery. This was one of those special events for me because Mr. Gallego had zero hours of training on GuestCentric service. It is encouraging for me to hear that all the hours spend on usability tests based on creating easy to use and time saving services for independent hotels has paid off with satisfied customers and it is definitely a motive to continue generating ways to ease up your workload.

Once the website was published he applied a direct marketing strategy provided by GuestCentric on how to increase website visitors, the results were extraordinary but I will tell you more about that some other time.
Check out Vale do Gaio Hotel website at www.valedogaio.com What do you think?

Article written for Hospitality Technology by Rodrigo Machaz, General Manager, Memmo  Baleeira Hotel

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Many of the discussions in our industry nowadays are centered on distribution. Should we rely mostly on online travel agents or should we invest in our websites? How should we build out our websites’ reach? Should we outsource or should we hire e-commerce managers?

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Managers of smaller independent hotels face tough challenges when it comes to promoting their brand: we don’t have an established brand, we don’t have the marketing and advertising budget and we certainly don’t have the information technology capabilities or the staff to be able to compete with the large chains that operate in our regions. However, we have two things they don’t have: we are more agile and we know our customers better. And these are two things that operators can use to their advantage, especially when it comes to leveraging the Internet to promote guest visits.

Choosing the right website partner

The first challenge that many operators will face is the mapping of their brand into a functional website that displays their product in the right light and provides some insight into the guests’ experience at their property. Look for an expert in promoting hotels online. At Memmo Baleeira Hotels, our first approach was to hire a design agency and although they designed a visually appealing website, it was not really directed at closing the sale. That is when we hired GuestCentric Systems, a company that focuses on providing independent hotels with tools to compete online.

Hotels need to have a management platform that provides a site with easy-to-understand menus, flash banners, and other interactive elements that they can manage themselves. The ability to change content that appeals to guests is essential in providing the customer experience that guests look for in independent hotels.

The right level of market visibility

With the right website in place, hotels can ramp up their online visibility even more by hiring a consultant to work with activities suppliers to get links exchanged and to utilize all online promotional outlets like press releases, article coverage, etc. We updated our hotel’s profile in TripAdvisor to ensure that it reflected the major improvements to the new brand and we signed up a few relevant channels like booking.com. All these actions can then be measured by website analytics that track the return of the effort put behind some of these activities. Once these major steps are accomplished, move the maintenance of your visibility strategy inside. Having good online distribution will not only provide you with incremental occupation, but, more importantly, it is a critical element in generating business on your direct website since as many as 50% of travelers start their search on OTAs, but prefer booking directly with the hotel.

Special offers: a hidden gem

One of the key elements in a successful website is a booking engine that makes it easy to book and upsells customers on special offers. One of the reasons that we chose GuestCentric was for their booking engine which creates an experience where potential guests can deal shop easily.

By doing so, the results can be tremendous. Since the introduction of our booking engine, our direct web revenues have surpassed all our other electronic channels, and during the week we introduced direct booking of promotions on our website we saw a 200% increase in bookings.

This is where the key lies: smaller independent hotels can make decisions quickly, and can differentiate via its products.

How to integrate guests into the process

Last, but not least, hotels should provide a special experience to their guests online, just as they would provide them with individual experiences on the property. At Memmo Baleeira Hotels, we embrace user-generated content and promote TripAdvisor reviews on our website. Hotels will also need a system that tracks guests’ preferences without being intrusive or too difficult to manage, that will also enable them to easily create targeted campaign for loyal guests.

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Rodrigo Machaz is the general manager of Memmo Baleeira Hotel in Sagres, Portugal. Rodrigo holds a bachelors degree in business administration and a masters in hotel management from Cornell University. Prior to Memmo Baleeira Hotels, Machaz worked as head of the European business development for Swisscom, and worked closely with chain hotels like NH and Hilton. For many years he worked with the Four Seasons Hotel & Resorts in Vancouver, San Diego and Lisbon.

We are happy to announce the release of the latest feature added to your GuestCentric service: the Website Builder.

After long hours of usability tests, we were able to create a simple and easy process to help you manage and create your website content from wherever you are in less than 15 minutes.

The website builder is a content management system tool integrated with the backend of our service. The feature was especially developed thinking on the needs of the Independent Hotels, just like you. This new feature among other things will help you to freely create and organize content for your website, update your website whenever you need and manage your website search engine optimization in a matter of a few clicks.

Learn more about the website builder in the backend of our service.

Adam Kirby, Associate Editor for Hotels Magazine wrote an interesting article on GuestCentric’s offer titled A Web-Builder For All Budgets.

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Sophisticated online marketing and flashy Web sites have almost exclusively been the domain of large brands and consortia, with smaller groups and independents happy just to have a working site that shows up in Google searches.

Those days may be in the past, thanks to new technology from Stamford, Connecticut-based GuestCentric Systems. GuestCentric’s InstantHotel technology, which starts at just US$70 a month, gives hoteliers a template to launch a Web site—complete with a modern Ajax-based booking engine—in a matter of hours. The templates let even Web novices get inventory and pricing online, without breaking the bank. Interactive elements, like Flash banners and maps, give the sites a professional look without the need to hire an in-house technology guru.

Rodrigo Machaz, general manager of the 110-key Memmo Baleeira Hotel in the Algarve, Portugal, says his hotel had no meaningful Web presence before installing the GuestCentric platform earlier this year. Within three months, Memmo was generating US$25,000 a month in online sales. “We thought we could not afford top-of-the-line technology, nor did we want to deal with the complexity of the features associated with the more sophisticated solutions out there,” Machaz says. “GuestCentric is a great compromise between top-of-the-line technology and simplicity.”

GuestCentric is able to confirm inventory real-time, while also weeding out double-bookings. Additionally, the software creates guest profiles and records guest usage patterns and preferences, enabling simple targeting for special offers or promotions. Using Web cookies, returning guests are recognized automatically and their experience personalized, without requiring them to log in.

GuestCentric has about 50 hotel clients to date, mostly in Europe. The system is slated to go fully live this month.

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