SRS-WORLDHOTELS Annual Conference Draws Record 300 Delegates to Portugal

SRS-WORLDHOTELS held its 2004 Hotelier Conference at the Ria Park Hotel in the Portuguese town of Almancil, near Faro, January 31 to February 2. A record 300 delegates from over 38 countries, representing more than 75% of the hotel group’s 450+ members, gathered for the three-day conference.

Under the conference theme 'Be Connected', SRS-WORLDHOTELS unveiled its headline 2003 results and targets and strategies for 2004.

CEO Michael Ball announced a 9% increase in room nights over the previous year, together with increases in yield, and an 11% increase in revenues delivered by its reservation systems for the organization’s hotel portfolio. What’s more, this portfolio grew by a record 56 independent hotels in 2003, among them the Lotte Hotel Seoul, Rocco Forte’s Browns Hotel in London, the Dai-ichi in Tokyo and major landmark hotels in The People’s Republic of China. In addition, a number of these new member hotels represent new destinations for the company, including Detroit and Las Vegas in the U.S., Krakow (Poland) and Vilinus (Lithuania).

For 2004, Michael Ball commented that the background business landscape had improved significantly in most major markets since the conference was held one year ago. He added that SRS-WORLDHOTELS was targeting double-digit growth in room nights and system-delivered revenues. Under its newly defined “Create and Capture Demand Strategy”, the company outlined its plans to grow business across a range of market segments. These include the new industry standard WORLDEVENTS product for meeting planners, introduced by Christian Fiederer, Vice President EMEA, as well as a range of initiatives focused on corporations and the retail agency community.

Roland Jegge, Vice President for Asia/Pacific, announced the successful opening of a new office in Shanghai to spearhead SRS-WORLDHOTELS’ expansion in that region. His counterpart in the Americas, Tom Griffiths, reported that the company will open a new office in Miami and that new marketing partnerships have been formed with American Airlines and other partners in the U.S. 

Unveiling the company’s new “Capturing Demand” strategy, Claudia Hammerstein, Vice President of Operations, also highlighted several new technology-based “firsts” for the company. These include: a new web site that incorporates a booking engine in Spanish, Italian, French, German and Japanese, next to English; increased connections to worldwide online retailers; a suite of new CRM customer tracking and reporting capabilities for both internal and hotel customers; and new group and corporate RFP products from the company-owned subsidiary Nexus World Services.

Hammerstein said that SRS-WORLDHOTELS had set a goal to increase, by the end of 2004, the number of room nights being processed via the Internet by more than 20%. She added that while the company was committed to rapidly expanding its distribution, and had signed a range of new agreements with online retailers in the past few months, hoteliers must nevertheless remain watchful that yield does not suffer by over-reliance on the specialized “Internet discounters.”

The theme of managing yield effectively was also taken up by one of the conference’s guest speakers, David Scowsill, CEO of Opodo, the Pan-European online Travel Company. Other guest speakers included Per Lydmar, founder of the famous Lydmar Hotel in Stockholm, who encouraged the audience to incorporate ideas of innovation and branding from other industries into the hotel sector in an inspiring presentation. The conference’s workshops, seminars and exhibition Tech Tank also included featured presentations from Sabre/Travel Network Galileo, Amadeus, iHamms and CNN.

In his closing remarks, Michael Ball commented again on the positive outlook for the industry and the company, and in particular how international hotel sales, marketing and distribution industries were increasing both in complexity and scope. He pointed out that this works to the advantage of independent hotels who increasingly can -- and should --“celebrate their character, individuality and independence,” harnessing an ever-widening number of channels and opportunities offered by SRS-WORLDHOTELS.