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All told, these hotels total more than 3,300 guestrooms and over 160 conference and banquet facilities ranging from Smart Meeting Rooms with "intelligent" high-tech equipment for smaller meetings to grand ballrooms. The ArabellaSheraton Grand Hotel Munich, for example, is the largest convention centre hotel in Europe. Since meeting and conference traffic is an integral part of ArabellaSheraton's total business, the company installed Delphi MPE as a central system to manage customer relationships as well as the extensive paperwork and operational detail associated with servicing large groups and meetings.

Many of the group's hotels had existing property-level systems to handle their sales, conference, and banqueting departments. These DOS systems were installed locally at each property. Cross selling from hotel-to-hotel was inefficient and difficult. Reporting against the entire group of properties was tedious and time-consuming, involving a combination of manual and automated functions. Implementing a centralized technology solution to fix these areas became essential to meet immediate and long-term sales goals.

Delphi MPE provides ArabellaSheraton's 110 salespeople with enterprise-wide customer information, group and conference booking system for all 13 hotels from a single database. Delphi MPE resides in ArabellaSheraton's datacentre in Munich running Microsoft SQL Server 7, Microsoft Terminal Server and Citrix Metaframe thin client technology. All 110 users across ArabellaSheraton access Delphi MPE over the company's Wide Area Network from any of the 13 hotels. The centralized database now makes cross-selling a reality, whereby a sales person in Frankfurt can confirm availability and rates and book business directly into a sister hotel in Munich, real time. This type of centralization is crucial as corporations migrate towards Application Service Provider (ASP) environments. Newmarket's first ASP solution, netDelphi, was announced in June.

"The goal of implementing Delphi MPE was to greatly improve customer satisfaction through answering clients' questions immediately and accurately. In this regard, it had to be a central system holding all of our hotels availability so everyone could access and view data from anywhere," says Oliver Bonke, ArabellaSheraton's Director of Sales & Marketing. "That was absolutely key to speeding response times on our group rooms and meeting space, improving customer relations and in turn, increasing revenues for the company."

Having historical and future business at their fingertips means that the ArabellaSheraton sales staff can quote yielded rates and confirm business on a customer's initial call. They have instant access to real-time guest- and function room availability, rates, meeting and conference information, full property detail, and customer data. Customers who were previously turned away by one hotel due to lack of availability can now be offered possibilities and availability at other ArabellaSheraton hotels. As a result, once a customer contacts an ArabellaSheraton sales office, the chances of their booking one of the group's properties is more than doubled with Delphi MPE.

Joachim Kohnle, ArabellaSheraton's Director of IT, says that by using the thin-client model, it has allowed the group to cut down total hardware costs. The system resides on a single database server in Munich and is accessed using the Citrix ICA client loaded on 110 desktops across Germany. "Moving from 13 fileservers and LANs in each of the hotels to one centralized system has made systems support and version upgrades much easier," says Kohnle. "It is also less expensive to offer a system such as Delphi MPE to all the group's properties, no matter how small or remote."

Staff training, organised jointly by Newmarket and ArabellaSheraton's own staff, has taken place over the course of the spring and summer of 2000. Newmarket dedicated a team to the task, including technical consultants, project managers and trainers. "Through Newmarket's dedication to the project, we were able to train and maintain the standards that ArabellaSheraton wanted to implement," says Mario Maxeiner, Manager Sales Automation for ArabellaSheraton. "The experience of the staff is that the system is fast and user-friendly, and the training and support from Newmarket is of a very high standard," continues Maxeiner.

Dan Hiza, managing director of Newmarket International's Europe, Middle East and Africa office, is looking forward to integrating Delphi MPE with each of ArabellaSheraton's 13 Fidelio property management systems (PMSs) and introducing to the cluster. "Now that ArabellaSheraton's customer relationship management database and meeting and conventions space is fully automated, we are taking the group to a much higher level by integrating Delphi MPE with Fidelio," says Hiza. "The two-way exchange of data will provide ArabellaSheraton with enterprise-wide availability, real time customer production and historical information that very few hotel groups have today. This will greatly enhance the way ArabellaSheraton conducts business with their customers and reports using business intelligence."

One of the main reasons the ArabellaSheraton group chose Newmarket was the fact that Delphi MPE was a proven product and had local, European support. Starwood Hotels & Resorts worldwide, the joint venture partner of the ArabellaSheraton group, uses Newmarket's products in most of its 700 worldwide hotels. ArabellaSheraton has set out to be one of the most technologically advanced hotel group in Europe, and the implementation of Delphi MPE is one important piece of that development strategy.

The Munich based ArabellaSheraton Hotelmanagement GmbH is responsible for the management and marketing of all the hotels belonging to the group through lease, management or franchise contracts. Its range of services includes strategic and commercial guidance along with everything related to successful hotel management, from hotel conception to interior decorating and managerial guidance. The ArabellaSheraton Hotelmanagement GmbH is a multi-disciplinary team, which includes specialists in the fields of hotel operations, controlling, development, marketing, public relations, technical aspects and electro-data processing.

Newmarket International () provides e-Business solutions that automate sales and operations for every type of hospitality venue, from independent hotels of any size to resorts, casinos, convention centers, convention & visitors bureaus, and the complete corporate enterprise. Newmarket is widely recognized as the premier innovator of scalable sales and catering systems, web-enabled applications, and e-Business strategies, including . A total solutions provider, Newmarket offers leading-edge technologies, onsite and Web-based training, consulting, project management and superior support based on unparalleled industry expertise.

Contact
Shawn McDonald
Director of Marketing
Phone: (603) 430-7434
Fax: (603) 436-1826
Email: smcdonald@newmarketinc.com

Organization
Amadeus Hospitality
https://www.amadeus-hospitality.com/
75 New Hampshire Avenue
USA - Portsmouth, NH 03801
Tollfree: 888-829-8871
Phone: 1 603 436 7500
Email: info@amadeus-hospitality.com

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