Sabre Hospitality Solutions, the industry’s leading global hospitality technology company, recently released the newest version of its web booking engine, Guest Connect Flex, with the specific goal of helping its hotel customers increase revenue generated from their property websites.  With its “flexible” shopping path designed to make the booking process intuitive to every type of traveler, it did not take long for Guest Connect Flex to achieve its goal.  The market response has been overwhelming and many hotels are already reporting double-digit increases in conversion rates and website revenue.

The Trump Hotel Collection switched to Guest Connect Flex in order to improve the guest’s overall experience (which in many cases starts with the booking), help increase revenues via up-selling opportunities, and help capture their increasing global market.  Since switching, reservation conversion rates have increased 50 percent (compared to the same period last year) and net revenue has increased by 29 percent.  This immediate performance improvement is not a temporary jump. Conversion rates have continued to surge demonstrating the value of Guest Connect Flex and its ability to meet the needs of Trump’s global guest market.  Trump is a member of Preferred Hotels & Resorts which also supports the Guest Connect Flex booking engine with other hotels across the group.

“There was specific functionality in the booking engine that we needed to make a true differences for us and our guests, and Sabre’s design and development team was able to deliver on all of them,” said Nathan Crisp, corporate director, revenue management for the Trump Hotel Collection.  “They have really enhanced the design and user experience of the booking process along with some other usability items like the comparison shopping feature, sorting, and filtering that will truly make this a rich but simple user experience, thereby helping us increase sales from this online channel.”

Guest Connect Flex, utilizes all of the original booking engine’s merchandising functionality like promotional pricing, dynamic packaging and itinerary bookings but adds a new streamlined layout.  In-depth market research and usability studies resulted in new features such as comparison shopping, enhanced image galleries with larger photos and “share with” tags to enhance the user experience.

As part of Sabre’s SynXis Central Reservation System (CRS), Guest Connect Flex allows for easy management of room and rate distribution to the property’s website, both traditional and mobile versions. Embedded tracking tools make it easy to measure ROI for all of your online marketing campaigns.  Other innovative features of Guest Connect Flex include:

*  31 languages supported including right-to-left support for Arabic
*  Total pricing reveals final price including taxes and extra charges to mirror other consumer travel and retail sites
*  Easy to read availability calendars that can be customized with rates and stay restrictions
*  Guests can opt for reservation review or to go straight to confirmation on a single page based on their own shopping preferences
*  ‘Room Grouping’ functionality accommodates properties with a large number of room/rate combinations
*  Expandable/collapsible product and package results
*  Shopping results can be filtered based on room type, price, rate plan or room feature

“Now that our customers can manage both online and mobile strategies directly from the SynXis CRS, they can be confident that their rooms and services are accessible on any device, at any time with a consistent brand experience,” said Kristie Goshow, vice president of marketing for Sabre Hospitality Solutions.  “Sabre Hospitality has been successfully driving innovation around the booking engine and mobile experience for many years; to the extent that it has become an example of industry best practice.  If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery then it has been quite rewarding to watch our competitor offerings over time.”