Small chains can ‘compete with Hiltons of this world’

Australian hotel booking solutions provider, RoomRez, has launched in the UK and already achieved a 30% increase in online revenues for its first client.

The company’s product flagship product, RezEngine, is aimed at small hotel chains and individual properties that want a competitive advantage by improving their direct online distribution. It is available in 21 different languages.

RoomRez’s first customer in the UK is myhotels, a luxury boutique brand with two properties in London and two further properties in the pipeline in London and Brighton.

Myhotels first used RoomRez to undertake keyword optimisation with Google in August, at a cost of around £250. According to myhotels managing director, Patrik Wennerland, this generated a more than 30% spike in online revenue.

The group now uses RoomRez to power its special and last-minute deals on myhotels.com, which is relaunching next week, and to help with marketing its brand online. Mr Wennerland told TravelMole: “We started off using a third party reservation provider to do our online distribution for us, but were not very happy with it. We found there were a lot of restrictions when it came to offering bespoke packages and getting to a particular segment of the market.

“We wanted to trim down our distribution partners to a handful of operators to work with and drive as much traffic as we could through our own myhotels.com website.”

RoomRez vice-president of sales and marketing Europe, Clifford Giles said: “Through search engine optimisation and through effective distribution and marketing there is potential to migrate customers who are using high cost channels like the phone to go direct and leverage the internet as a booking platform.”

He added: “To a certain extent we enable smaller chains and individual properties to compete with the Hiltons of this world.”

RoomRez opened its UK office in Maidenhead about a month ago and already has offices in Ireland, Germany and Switzerland in addition to its headquarters in Sydney.

Mr Giles said he welcomes moves by companies such as Marriott and InterContinental to take better control of their online distribution. He said: “For years, hotels have been at the mercy of online discounters. RoomRez puts the power back into the hands of hoteliers because it gives them the tools to take control of their rooms inventory, improve yield management and get better connected with their online customers.”