As an added service to meeting planners, Hyatt Hotels & Resorts
announced today their decision to implement Passkey
as their online group reservations management solution. The initial deployment will encompass Hyatt’s predominately group oriented properties, but then will proliferate more broadly through Hyatt hotels and resorts in the U.S., Canada and Caribbean chain. The decision to implement Passkey was made within the context of Hyatt’s ongoing drive to adopt tools and policies that will make it easier for meeting planners to do business with the hotel chain. Hyatt reviewed various solutions and selected Passkey for the application’s richness of functionality, integration flexibility and growing market position as the de facto standard for group housing management for any size meeting - from family reunions and weddings to corporate meetings or tradeshows.

“We needed to address the two major, related challenges ailing the industry - attrition and book-arounds - and so we chose the one solution that planners are familiar with and that has already demonstrated its effectiveness at curbing those issues,” explained Ty Helms, Senior Vice President of Sales. “By selecting Passkey, Hyatt is continuing its commitment to the meeting planner community by always delivering the best solutions for them.”

The decision to implement Passkey is consistent with Hyatt’s focus on providing leading edge meeting management solutions to planners, such as Hyatt’s E-mmediate Response(TM) Technology, that enables planners to plan and book meetings in real-time via the Internet. Also, Hyatt was the first in hospitality to provide a customized reservation web site that let group guests check availability, book their individual guest room reservations at the negotiated group rate, access hotel and destination information and link back to their registration site. Now meeting planners doing business with Hyatt will have better control on their own events and room blocks, and will be able to simplify many of the time-consuming processes that have been manual until now. More reservations will be processed online and the need to re-key attendee information will be minimized. At the same time, event histories will become more accurate and easily accessible.

“Hyatt has always been a recognized leader in the industry—always raising the bar,” said Greg Pesik, Passkey’s President & CEO. “Like Hyatt, Passkey is setting a standard in the hospitality industry when it comes to providing the right solutions to manage group business.”

Hyatt meeting planners will benefit from having shared access to Passkey’s collaborative, centralized event database, providing them accurate visibility 24/7 into how their meetings are materializing. Accessibility to real-time information about a meeting attendee’s reservation progress, together with an array of powerful tools for managing booking behavior, minimizes the incidence of attendees booking around group blocks and, in turn, planners’ exposure to attrition charges. Customized event websites offer attendees a full and pleasant hotel shopping experience, including the ability to make, modify, or cancel reservations online and receive instant confirmations. Repeat meetings can be copied from one set of dates to the next, expediting the event set-up process. Furthermore, planners have the ability to run reports at anytime, further enhancing the communication between hotels and meeting planners.

Another significant benefit to planners is Passkey RegLink(SM), which enables any registration system to seamlessly integrate with Passkey, which significantly reduces book-arounds and gives planners even more control over their events. As Susan Grigsby, CMP, Conference Manager for CUNA Mutual explained, “We integrated our system, Certain Software/Reg123, with Passkey through RegLink for our Discovery Program. This proved to be a highly worthwhile investment for CUNA Mutual Group, since we were able to access reports, monitor the group block real-time, and by allowing our customers to register and book their hotel rooms online, it eliminated the need for them to fax or call the hotel directly. Hyatt Hotels’ decision to offer Passkey to meeting planners is a valuable investment in technology that will bring all parties measurable ROI.”
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