Hotel Technology Next Generation

Planning a trip to New Mexico or Arizona this year? Be sure to experience the colorful ambiance of the area's rich Native American, Spanish, and Mexican Colonial history. The best way to do this is a stay at any of the seven independent properties operated by Heritage Hotels & Resorts. Each of Heritage’s properties has its own distinctive Southwestern personality. Whether you are stopping in Las Cruces, Santa Fe, or Albuquerque, New Mexico or in Rio Rico, Arizona, Heritage has a beautiful hotel or resort you can call home. And all are managed centrally with the help of a cloud-based hotel software financial accounting system.

"Guests value the Southwestern flavor of our independent properties because each has its own style that reflects the cultural history of its location," said Felene Koen, corporate controller for Heritage Hotels & Resorts. "We are careful about the hotels we acquire so we can offer a rich experience that gives guests a way to connect in a meaningful way to our part of the US. Because our properties are in separate areas, we link them to our corporate office with the Profitvue cloud-based central hotel management accounting system from Aptech Computer Systems. Profitvue enables us to see daily revenue and expense performance for each hotel." Click here to learn more about Aptech’s products and services.

Daily communication with hotels through web-based platform triggers better profitability
Although all of Heritage’s properties could double as resorts, each hotel also offers professional function spaces with a full suite of meeting amenities. "Our properties are not just for leisure travelers," Koen said. "We offer an excellent venue for conferences, corporate meetings, luncheons, dinners, receptions, retreats, reunions, and board meetings. Our segment mix includes corporate, social, education, religious, fraternal, government, military, and associations. We use Aptech’s Webvue internet utility to communicate with all of our hotels daily so we can develop better forecasting and manage for better profitability by the numbers." Koen explained that Heritage’s team uses Profitvue’s multi-property back office to generate daily customized reports for each hotel to capture labor, revenue, food, and beverage metrics, and many other key indicators of property performance. "Profitvue gives us the reporting flexibility an independent company like ours requires, and their team creates other custom reports specifically for Heritage."

Technology provider hosts the Heritage corporate financial platform, lets hoteliers be hoteliers
Heritage relies on Aptech to host its Profitvue financial platform at Aptech’s secure hosting facilities in Pittsburgh. "There are many advantages of having Aptech host our system," Koen said. "The most important is that Heritage is a hotel company, not a technology shop. Aptech maintains our system, backs up our data regularly, updates the software so we are always on the latest version, and provides hands-on support for Profitvue on their own hardware. All we need is an internet connection to access our system and monitor property performance." Heritage also uses Aptech’s Execuvue Lite Business Intelligence system to give them a global view of their enterprise.

One-page Execuvue Lite report rolls up all properties to easily verify budget variances
Heritage is also working with Aptech’s team to create a new suite of reports in Execuvue Lite that will enable the Heritage team to roll up all its properties side by side for expense and revenue comparisons that spotlight best practices. "We just received our new reports that will put our properties on one page to make it very easy to compare rates, segment performance, costs, and other data to verify if our numbers are within budget and identify variances," Koen said. "It is very easy to add properties to both systems, which is important as we continue to expand Heritage. Aptech’s solutions are affordable, multi-property systems that handle all of our financial processes."

About Heritage Hotels & Resorts
Heritage Hotels & Resorts is a cultural hospitality company offering a collection of award winning accommodations with distinctive style. Each celebrates the rich, multi-cultural heritage of the southwestern United States, drawing from its unique blend of Native American, Mexican, Spanish, and American Western cultural and historical influences. In 2006 Heritage Hotels & Resorts earned nationwide recognition by being selected as the National Minority Business Retail Firm of the Year by the United States Department of Commerce's Minority Business Development Agency. The award honored Heritage Hotels for significant contributions to the local community and to America's economic strength and global competitiveness. Heritage Hotels & Resorts may be reached at http://www.hhandr.com

About Aptech | Aptech, a Jonas Hospitality Company, is a leading provider of enterprise accounting, business intelligence, financial planning and management solutions for the hospitality industry. Its award-winning solutions, which include PVNG, Execuvue and Targetvue, form an integrated technology ecosystem that is designed to help hoteliers at both the corporate and property levels understand their financial and operational data and provide actionable insights. With more than 50 years of experience in the hospitality industry, Aptech's state-of-the-art solutions are used by more than 3,500 properties across North America. For more information, please visit www.aptech-inc.com.