Sandals and Beaches Resorts
have made their presence felt at this year’s ITB with the official launch of their new compelling multi-lingual website. Breaking Travel News caught up with Bobby Stewart, Managing Director Sandals & Beaches.
How are you finding ITB Berlin?

It’s a good show for us. The consumer day yesterday was better than last year. Tomorrow we we’ll be giving out lots of information to our tour operators. It is the first year that we have used this stand, which is a new design with two screens and we are all enjoying it.

What are you doing here at ITB?

We are launching a compelling new foreign language version of the main Sandals website to compliment the main Sandals site that was launched last year. The site will have a new, cleaner look and will be much more interactive for the user. There will also be a version of the site deployed for the Beaches properties.

We are really looking forward to launching these websites, which will be available in German, French and Italian and we will be officially launching them on Monday.

We are also promoting the opening of Sandals Whitehouse in Jamaica. There are 360 rooms on the South Coast of Jamaica. We are the first resort chain to put a hotel in that area and all rooms are ocean-facing which we are excited about.

As far as your technology budget goes, how will that compare to last year?

Our technology budget for 2004 has grown by 24%

Did Sandals’ hit their expected targets for 1Q?

Yes, we exceeded our target.

Where is Sandals in terms of wireless technologies?

We plan to implement wireless in several of our resorts this year.
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