The exponential growth of business coming from the internet in the travel and tourism industry is matched by an equally growing trend - savvier, more demanding customers.Ê To help Caribbean hoteliers stay on top of the game, Global Booking Solutions® and the Caribbean Hotel Association (CHA) have signed a strategic alliance that will enable CHA member hotels to offer clients the ability to book hotel, air, and land, in real time, through the hotel’s own website.Ê Ê“Global Booking Solutions® enables Caribbean small, medium, and large hotels to provide customers the ability to buy their complete vacation package without ever leaving the hotel’s website during the booking process. In this day and age, this can mean the difference between just looking and an actual booking,” explained CHA Director General Alec Sanguinetti.

“What is more, because Global Booking Solutions® has secured contract bulk fares from numerous carriers serving the Caribbean region for packaging with land, customers have access to exclusive low airfares.”

An important feature of the service is the control it gives hoteliers to manage their room rates and inventory, with no room allotments, in order to maximize their yield and margins.

“This is a significant step in CHA’s mission to advance Caribbean tourism, by helping the hotel sector to regain some measure of control in the distribution of the Caribbean tourism product,” added Sanguinetti.

Another benefit of the Global Booking Solutions® program is that there are no cooperative advertising fees or tour operator fees; the hotel pays an annual membership fee based on hotel size and a booking transaction fee on the hotel component. The fee is only 11% for CHA hotels, an exclusive treatment which emphasizes the value of membership in CHA.Ê The fee for non-CHA members goes up to 15%.

Global Booking Solutions® is a division of the Troni Marketing Group. It is led by President Bob Troni, a veteran airline executive, former Managing Director International Sales & Marketing of American Airlines.

“For the past 5 years, I’ve been hearing from numerous Caribbean hoteliers of the need for a system to offset the pressure and high cost of working with third parties to offer customers a vacation package at their hotels,” explained Troni.

“The major obstacle was the inability to offer the air component to those customers visiting the hotel’s website. Global Booking Solutions was established to meet these needs, so that hotels may ‘Take Back Control’ of their rooms and rates at a much lower cost.”

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