Portugal Telecom picks GuestCentric to power hotel and tourism service provider cloud
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New all-in-one “Office box” service helps boutique hotels and independent properties attack the digital marketplace
LISBON, February 29, 2012 — GuestCentric, the award-winning provider of hotel digital marketing solutions continues its worldwide expansion and announced today that it has been selected by Portugal Telecom to provide the foundation for its cloud services for boutique hotels and independent properties in Portugal. This partnership enables Portugal Telecom to meet the demanding expectations of its 2,000 boutique and independent hotel customers providing them with the capability to deliver extraordinary service to hotel online shoppers wherever they may be: online, mobile or social networks.
Portugal Telecom has a strong presence in the hospitality market for its voice, data and mobile services helping hoteliers overcome the complexity of IT, offering a comprehensive communications platform with voice, video, data and mobile.
Its next-generation cloud services, built on the reliability and resiliency of the GuestCentric, are being developed to meet customer demand for increasingly sophisticated digital marketing.
“Digital marketing in the cloud is a growing concern for our hospitality and tourism customers. Many of our hotel customers are already planning their migration to cloud solutions,” said Goncalo Fernandes, Director of SME Vertical Solutions, Portugal Telecom. “GuestCentric proved to be the most feature-rich and the highest performing solution optimized to meet our stringent requirements. Coupling our next-generation video delivery service MEO with SmartCloud solutions like GuestCentric’s will revolutionize the digital market for the hospitality segment in Portugal.”
Hotels using the new Portugal Telecom service will increase online reservations and lower distribution costs with four unique solutions:
- Engaging hotel website design and content management for online and mobile users;
- A best-in-class booking engine, that is also optimized for smartphones and tablets;
- Professional facebook pages and innovative social media marketing leveraging networks like twitter;
- Centralized reservations and channel management which provides strategic decision support data to improve marketing reach and impact.
“Portugal’s hotel market is highly fragmented and led by independent operators that have traditionally relied on a few distribution channels to promote their properties to consumers. The new SmartCloud offer by Portugal Telecom has the power to change this,” said Joao Trindade, VP of Marketing of GuestCentric. “Portugal Telecom, with its extensive roster of hotel customers, is the perfect partner to help Portugal’s independent hoteliers change their approach to digital marketing in a decisive way.”
