Having recently completed a corporate relocation and implemented more than $300 million in companywide capital improvements, Omni Hotels attention is now focused on the rollout of its multi-million dollar Revenue Management System, OmniCHARM.

With the help of the companys associates who submitted recommendations as part of a contest to name the Revenue Management System, Omni Hotels is banking that OmniCHARM will be the charm to Omni Hotels continued success.

“Omni Hotels long-term business plan calls for maximizing revenues and building customer loyalty,” says Jim Caldwell, Omni Hotels president. “To achieve this goal, we must focus on creating a dynamic service culture and leveraging technologyto help us achieve higher levels of service excellence while maximizing revenue.”

Caldwell says the OmniCHARM system is expected to increase Omni Hotels overall annual revenue by as much as eight percent, adding to the more than 20 percent premium Omni Hotels currently holds over its upscale hotel chain competitors.

While revenue management is not new to the hotel and overall travel industry - airlines spearheaded the technology in the 1980s—the extent to which Omni Hotels will utilize the system is.

In an unprecedented move, the privately owned upscale hotel chain is flipping the bill to equip all of its 44 properties, franchises included, with the new revenue management system. The company has also taken the necessarysteps of setting up Beta testing sites at select Omni Hotels properties around the country to “work out the technology kinks” before unveiling the system companywide, unlike many of its competitors. And finally, Omni Hotels specially designed Revenue Management System will allow the company to not only manage its room inventory, but also develop a detailed, multipurpose customer profile database to use in conjunction with the companys frequent guest program.

Designed to help the company “sellthe right room to the right guest for the right length of stay at the right rate,” OmniCHARM will process all of the companys booking transactions, incorporate user adjustments and then update the companywide forecasting database every night.

Information recorded in the property management and central reservation systems will be used to determine the most accurate rooms forecast for selling purposes. OmniCHARMs ability to compare historical same-day information along with current booking trends will provide the most accurate rooms forecasting system - a more accurate process than the standard of comparing historical data or analyzing current booking trends alone.

OmniCHARM will also be able to forecast cancellations and no-shows, whichwill help the company set appropriate overbooking limits to help balance the risk of walking a guest on a sell-out night against having unsold rooms for the same night. Flexible overrides will allow users at the properties and central reservation centertofine-tune the system for optimum performance. From a technological standpoint, the most amazing feature of OmniCHARMs forecasting process is the large number of transactions that the system will perform each night—between 100,000 and 150,000 algorithms.

To make OmniCHARM user-friendly for associates, Omni Hotels had the system developed for the latest Windows NT software, and according to Caldwell, no one else in the industry has a standardized, Windows NT-based revenue management systemchainwide.

“In the hotel business, there is nothing more fundamental than knowing how many rooms we sell and at what price,” says Caldwell. “With OmniCHARM, we will be able to capture and exploit our full forecasting and rooms tracking potential.

Headquartered in Irving, Texas, Omni Hotels is a privately owned chain of 44 first-class and luxury hotels and resorts located throughout the United States and Mexico. Omni Hotels properties offer four-star services ranging from gourmet dining, fitness facilities, tennis, golf, wine tastings, tours of local attractions, music festivals and childrens activities. Omni Hotels will continue an aggressive agenda for expansion in first-tier markets and key secondary cities, with an emphasison the Midwest and West Coast.

Contact:
Kim Clay
Omni Hotels
[email protected]

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