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More than 60% of online travelers begin their search for online accommodations through online travel agents like Expedia.com, Bookings.com or Lastminute.com. Once they find the accommodation that fits their needs, travelers search directly for the property’s website to find out more information about pricing and amenities. It is the perfect opportunity to capture their attention so make sure your web design, website content and website navigation are impeccable because they play a very important role when differentiating your property from your competitors and converting visitors into guests.

See how GuestCentric can transform your website design for maximum visibility.

Stay tuned for next post about BOOK

by Michele McDonald from Travel Technology Update

Large hotels and hotel chains leverage technology extensively to distribute their inventory, but it’s not so easy for smaller properties. For the manager of a 25- to 150- room hotel, technology can be expensive. It’s often difficult to use. It might require special knowledge. Read more

Like many other hotels all over the world, Cuatro Naciones experienced a dramatic drop of 50% on their reservations at the beginning of 2009. Aware of the changes in preferences of the travelers towards online services, the hotel had to look for online solutions to help them overcome the economic crisis, provide exceptional services for demanding travelers and increase their direct online booking. After an exhaustive search with different providers, the manager of the hotel found in GuestCentric Systems the solution that best fit their needs; a company that focuses primarily on independent properties and provides a one-stop-shop online solution at affordable prices.

The Hotel Cuatro Naciones adapted GuestCentric’s e-Comerce solutions that included a full-feature platform, which provided them with powerful online marketing and distribution tools like:

• A brand new hotel website design
• An innovative booking engine
• A reservation platform
• Direct social media integration with Twitter and Facebook

The results exceeded all expectations. Within a month and a half of launching their new website and booking engine, the hotel had a 190% increase on their direct online reservations.  And in the middle of an unfavorable economic period, within 3 months of deployment the online reservations alone were responsible for an increase of 180% on the overall hotel business.

It is very important for the hoteliers to have a simple and integrated platform that allows them to spend more time in strategically planning and taking care of their customers rather than only managing reservations. See case study

Learn more on how GuestCentric can help you grow your online business.

The new Spring Edition of GuestCentric e-commerce cloud is now live! This new release is the foundation to make the GuestCentric platform more flexible and faster than ever. We have opened up the platform to allow a community of developers and designers to contribute to the development of our platform and this will create more choice for independent hoteliers. If you have anything you would like to tell us, do not hesitate to send us an email to suggestions@guestcentric.com, and keep checking back for additions and improvements.

Just launched!
New API for open community
	GuestCentric is creating the foundations for exciting developments GuestCentric just published a public API (Application Programming Interface) and with it we are allowing a new community of developers to build new features, gadgets, plugins and interfaces on top of our platform.
Portable Booking Engine
	Develop your own website and just plug your GuestCentric booking engine in With the new plugins for the popular content management systems Joomla and Wordpress, developing a new hotel website and integrating it with GuestCentric powerful booking engine and back-office couldn’t be easier.
Easier and faster website uploads
	Same host provider, new GuestCentric website For customers that publish their websites on external hosting providers, the publication via FTP just got easier and so much faster. New integration with Microsoft based servers using IIS widens your choice of providers
Better support
	Customer service portals for closer interaction In order to provide faster, more responsive service to your needs we have created three new customer oriented portals: the Customer Portal where users can log cases and the new Twitter Support for updates and status off the platform. The immediate result of these great tools will be a better customer service that will lead to an even better platform performance.
Share your ideas
	Make your mark on future developments GuestCentric launched the new GetSatisfaction customer community websitewhere customers can share experiences and provide feedback such as feature suggestions. The immediate result of these websites will be a better customer service that will lead to even better platform performance.
Expanded page design
	Develop more elaborated page content With the new “page HTML edit” feature on your page edit tab, we added a new boost on your page content development skills. Now you are able to develop HTML for a specific content page and deploy it directly on GuestCentric platform. This will allow you to add another level to your website content with total control.
Bigger, stunning images!
	Your images are getting bigger but their weight isn’t Design tendencies as well as screen resolutions are pointing to bigger and bigger pictures on websites. With the new compression algorithm, you can add bigger pictures to your GuestCentric’s media manager that will allow you to frame them and crop them to the optimal web compression.
A polyglot Booking Engine
	Vau, tämä on hienoa! (Wow, this is great!) We continue our commitment to internationalize our platform thus allowing easier interactions with all guests. In this edition we added Finnish support.
Easier and faster website uploads
	Google power for e-mail reliability To ensure e-mail reliability, GuestCentric moved its platform e-mail mechanism to Google’s Gmail service. This top-notch e-mail service is now sending all platform notifications such as new reservations.
Dig deeper into your analytics
	Get better information to make better decisions With the improved booking engine reports you will have a clearer view on your performance. The enhanced reports will now allow you to view results by check-out date thus providing a clearer view on performance per best offer, best customer or best country.

Enjoy!
GuestCentric Team
Filipe Machaz
VP of Product Management

The new module allows Joomla!’s developers to have easy and simple access to GuestCentric’s premier e-commerce solutions

GuestCentric Systems (http://www.guestcentric.com), the social cloud provider of e-commerce solutions for the independent hotel industry today announced the launching of yet another extension. The new module allows the seamless insertion of GuestCentric’s booking engine on any Joomla! website.

Finally web designers using Joomla! will be able to provide hotel customers a modern booking experience and distribute online promotions to Twitter and Facebook. The booking engine provides guests a unique secure shopping experience with a Rates+Availability map that allows increasing conversion rates, maximizing revenue-per-stay and generating satisfied guests. GuestCentric provides the only booking engine in the industry that provides two security shields that guarantee that the customer’s information remains private. The shopping experience is uniquely interactive, allowing key features like deal shopping or one-click checkout for returning guests.

This innovative module further extends the lead of GuestCentric’s booking engine as the most portable in the industry. Just recently GuestCentric announced a plug-in for Wordpress, this new Joomla! module is available for any Joomla! website and supports different languages and layouts. The plug-in is available at: http://www.guestcentric.com/booking-engine-module-for-joomla/

“The insertion of the module is extremely easy, in a matter of minutes Joomla! developers can offer their customers a website with professional online bookings”. said Rolando Isidoro author of the booking engine module for Joomla!. “The module provides freedom to Joomla! users to customize their booking engine by selecting from a wide range of languages and layouts. Joomla! users with basic CSS knowledge can optimize its look and feel by customizing simple properties like fonts, colors and buttons.”

Joomla! is a community-back open source CMS with a large and active fan base. The default system includes an assortment of basic extensions and templates, but many more are available for installation. Joomla! has a large installation base and enjoys wide developer and third party support.

“By adopting GuestCentric’s cloud computing platform, Joomla! developers will gain access to a cost-effective web-based e-commerce management solution”, said Filipe Machaz, GuestCentric’s VP of Product Management. “Independent hotel managers can finally fight their increasing dependence on online travel agents by marketing their properties online and leveraging new customer engagement techniques like social commerce.”

About GuestCentric

GuestCentric Systems develops and markets web services that revolutionize the way independent hotels work. GuestCentric has built a social cloud solution that allows independent hotels to develop long-standing relationships with guests, improve online revenues and lower expense and dependence on online distribution. GuestCentric also provides hoteliers with a professional hotel website design. Through use of Web 2.0 technologies, GuestCentric provides easy-to-use tools at reasonable prices that up until now were only available for hotels with big budgets.

WordPress plug-in enforces GuestCentric’s hotel booking engine as the most portable in the industry

GuestCentric Systems the premier Software-as-a Service provider for the independent hotel industry today announced the availability of a plug-in that allows websites and blogs built on WordPress to easily include GuestCentric’s innovative hotel booking engine.

The new plug-in opens the door to WordPress designers to create websites with state of the art technologies for the hotel industry. For the first time designers can easily offer fully integrated e-commerce facilities on websites and/or blogs, by installing GuestCentric’s portable booking engine to promote online bookings. The new plug-in is available at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/guestcentric-booking-gadget/

“The idea was to create a WordPress plug-in that simplified the insertion of GuestCentric’s booking engine by using an easy-to-use widget interface,” said Pedro Araujo author of the booking engine WordPress plug-in. “the installation of the plug-in is extremely easy. All you need to do is to insert an API Key that is provided by GuestCentric platform, select the type of widget and in less than a minute a property can have direct online bookings from a WordPress webpage.”

GuestCentric provides the fastest hotel booking engine in the industry based on the latest Ajax technology. The booking engine provides guests a unique secure shopping experience with a Rates+Availability map that allows increasing conversion rates, maximizing revenue-per-stay and generating satisfied guests. The shopping experience is uniquely interactive, allowing key features like deal shopping or one-click checkout for returning guests.

“The WordPress web design and development community has created over 200 million websites and blogs. The new plug-in developed for WordPress is a response to WordPress web designers need to include top-notch e-commerce solutions on hotel sites and blogs.” said Filipe Machaz, GuestCentric’s Vice-President of Product Management “With this new application, WordPress designers finally have the opportunity to easily offer great hotel websites and enhance their market share in the hotel industry. By embracing this leading-edge community GuestCentric will continue its path to level the playing field for independent hotel owners and operators.”

WordPress platform is preferred more and more by hoteliers around the world, because it simplifies the integration of blogs with CMS; this provides managers different and better ways to promote hotels online.

About GuestCentric
GuestCentric Systems develops and markets web services that revolutionize the way independent hotels work. GuestCentric has built a Software as a Service platform that allows independent hotels to develop long-standing relationships with guests, improve online revenues and lower expenses associated with online distribution. Also it provides hoteliers with a professional hotel website design. Through use of Web 2.0 technologies, GuestCentric provides easy-to-use tools at reasonable prices that up until now were only available for hotels with big budgets.

Being at the forefront of innovation for the hospitality industry sometimes creates unplanned obstacles: how do you encapsulate in a “buzz word” a multitude of features in a way that people will understand: what it is and what it does? Let me tell you, it’s not easy.  I think this is what happens when people hear about our portable booking engine. “Is this hotel booking engine really portable?”: Yes it is. “Ok, so what do you mean by portable?”: it’s actually a good thing you asked because this will allow me to explain how this works a bit better! I will give you 3 examples:

1. You can post it in websites: Our Hotel Booking engine will allow you to place it on any website just by adding a link with a “book now” image. This means that if you have a restaurant or a surf academy that you partner with, you can easily add your hotel’s booking engine in their website and expand your visibility.
2. You can post it in Facebook: Expanding your brand nowadays is a key success factor for hotels and Facebook is one of the main ingredients. With GuestCentric’s Portable booking engine you can add booking capabilities to Facebook that will allow people to book directly.
3. You can send it via Twitter: So, you have your Twitter account setup and, with the help of GuestCentric’s Twitter Center, you are following a bunch of people that mention your hotel’s name or your location. If someone mentions that they want to travel on a specific time frame to your area, what do you do? With GuestCentric Portable booking engine you can send this person a tweet (a twitter message for those not yet familiar with these new words) with a link. This link can be setup to open the booking engine with the dates pre-selected and even the room choice pre-selected. How cool is that?!

Best of all, we’re always talking about the same booking engine, same back-office/platform and the same security. This means that you can do all this with no extra work, extra software and probably the most important factor, no extra cost!
PS: If you think you have a better term for it, I would love to hear it

(View Pedro’s presentation at the PhoCusWright Innovation Summit ‘09)

GuestCentric Systems (http://www.guestcentric.com), the premier Software-as-a Service provider for the independent hotel industry, announced a new pricing model for its web-based e-commerce management solution capped at $499. This new pricing model includes GuestCentric’s best-in-class hotel booking engine, hotel analytics, guest CRM and the just released social commerce tools.

“Despite GuestCentric’s consecutive months of increased sales records, in 2009 we noticed that some prospect properties from our main markets US, UK and Spain were not able to commit to the monthly fixed cost. That was when it was decided to share the risks with our customers and offer a revenue-share plan with a monthly threshold that will simplify our pricing and expand our potential customer’s base.” Said Miguel Gaia GuestCentric’s E-commerce director

With the new pricing plan, hoteliers are guarantee that they will only be charged for usage of the comprehensive e-commerce management platform when they make money. The default rate for hotels of up to 100 rooms is 6% capped at $499 for bookings that are processed with GuestCentric’s portable booking engine. This means that regardless the amount of reservations received per month, hoteliers will never pay more than $499. For properties larger than 100 rooms or portals with multiple properties, the pricing will be negotiated on a case-by-case basis.

The new pricing provides opportunities for independent hotels to have access to top-notch technology to sell their rooms online, manage rates and availability, and optimize their customer engagement process using social media outlets at affordable prices. This breakthrough pricing presents for the first time a real opportunity for small hotels to access such a high-end product.

About GuestCentric’s features:

Powerful e-commerce

• Portable hotel booking engine – GuestCentric’s best-in-class booking engine provides a unique shopping experience with unparallel speed and convenience for guests willing to book online. GuestCentric’s booking engine is the only portable booking engine in the market that can be directly integrated to different websites, like Facebook, YouTube or partner websites.
• Hotel analytics – GuestCentric offers dashboards and reports provides alerts and notification of how to improve the property’s online progress, as well as check the website’s visibility, sales focus, bookable offers, and overall performance.
• Guest CRM – The system automatically collects a complete guest profile with the guest’s stay history. This information is crucial to create successful marketing campaigns to promote special deals and loyalty.

Social customer engagement

• Twitter center – Send, track, monitor and schedule messages on Twitter and easily monitor what people are saying about the property.
• Follower specials – Increase the brand exposure, create a loyalty program and easily reward social media followers with special deals created and available exclusively for them.
• Customer intimacy – Provide a more personalize service to your guests and learn more about who they are, what they want, need or think. Twitter profiles as well as last post are fully integrated with guest’s profile.

Time saving tools

• Set and forget setup – The easy-to-use interface of the platform allows a quick setup process in 45 minutes.
• Multilingual support – Increase brand presence and reach other regions by offering the booking engine and website in up to 5 languages in a fast and intuitive manner.
• Picture manager – a sophisticated and intuitive picture manager that allows you to easily upload and display images as you wish on your website.

Additional pricing information and details on signing up for a 14 day free trial, available on http://www.guestcentric.com/pricing

About GuestCentric Systems
GuestCentric Systems develops and markets web services that revolutionize the way independent hotels work. GuestCentric has built a Software as a Service platform that allows independent hotels to develop long-standing relationships with guests, improve online revenues and lower expenses associated with online distribution. Through use of Web 2.0 technologies, GuestCentric provides easy-to-use tools at reasonable prices that up until now were only available for hotels with big budgets.

Posted by Chicke Fitzgerald Founder of Solutionz Media

In the “The Future of the Social Web,” report released by Forrester in April 2009, by Jeremiah Owyang, a Forrester senior analyst, laid out the past, present and future state of the social Web into five overlapping eras. According to Owyang, the era of social commerce was slated to begin in 2011.

Forrester chart the era of social media

Well, social commerce is here. Today

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