Schedule your demo today!

At Travel Tripper, our mission is to help hotels generate as much direct business as possible – business from your own website and from your own call centers. Never before has our tagline – be direct – seemed more relevant than now and our product roadmap reflects that mission. Do take a look at what we’ve been working on to reinforce your hotel’s brand directly in front of the consumers.   

What’s new with Reztrip?

• Making it easier to manage RezTrip as a channel

Your direct booking engine is your preferred sales channel, and we want to make sure it’s also the easiest channel for you to manage. We’ve been integrating RezTrip with property management systems, and we’ve also become an official channel on EZYield and RateTiger. We’ll soon be available on RateGain as well. If you use a channel management tool, using RezTrip is now even easier.

• Bookings from Facebook

For those of you marketing on Facebook (and who isn’t?) we’ve built a RezTrip booking app that can be added to your hotel’s Facebook page. Drive traffic from your page straight to your booking engine.

• RezTrip 2.0 is now PCI Compliant

Travel Tripper now meets the credit card industry’s security standards as a level-2 service provider. This means that our servers and your data are air-tight. We go even beyond the requirements of PCI-DSS in a very important way: we do not store credit card data for any longer than is necessary to deliver it to you.

•  User experience improvements

We’ve begun a series of improvement which continue to refine the user experience of RezTrip. We’ve made it easier and more natural to navigate between steps of the shopping process, and recently we rolled out a simplified payment page. These refinements in many cases are subtle, but they all drive at the same thing: direct revenue to you. Our aim is to provide industry leading conversion rates and revenue per booking.

• Mobile booking engine under works

We’ve been working on a mobile version of RezTrip for the last few months, and now we’re almost ready for a beta release of this exciting new product. RezTrip mobile features an incredibly simple, fast and compelling shopping process. We believe this product will set a new industry standard, and we look forward to sharing more details later this Fall.

Revup’s Five Steps to Pricing Success

Key Contacts

Since we last wrote, in October, we’ve released 17 software updates to RezTrip 2. We fixed 347 issues. We released 121 enhancements, 17 new features, and completed 124 engineering improvements.

In April we wrapped up our beta testing period (thanks to all who participated) and we’ve now been officially live for 3 very productive and profitable months. Many of the tasks we’ve been working aren’t visible on the surface, but thanks to our engineering team’s attention to detail RezTrip 2 has achieved 99.9% uptime — including scheduled downtime for releases.

Last week we released a major update, and we’d like to showcase some of the more interesting and exciting features. Here’s the list in brief; continue reading if you want more detail. And if you have any questions, please let us know!

Latest Updates:

1. RezTrip Facebook App
2. Internationalization: RezTrip is now multilingual!
3. Flip.to social marketing integration
4. Managing RezTrip rates & inventory through EZYield and RateTiger
5. PCI Compliance
6. Cascade of yield controls on the rate grid is now optional
7. Shorter, easier to remember URLs to get to RezTrip
8. LMS / HTNG 2-way reservations & ARI interface
9. Run reports for longer date ranges

 1. There’s now a RezTrip Facebook App! Add the app to your hotel’s Facebook page so that guests can search for rooms directly from Facebook. This can significantly increase conversion rates for social marketing campaigns.

2. Reztrip is now multilingual! We now speak English, French, Spanish, Italian, German and Portuguese. And while we were at it, we polished up our English. We think you’ll agree that the language of the booking engine is friendlier and more straightforward.

While we’ve taken care of translating standard labels and strings on RezTrip, you will need to manually load translated names and descriptions for your rooms, rates, promotions, policies, bed types, etc. If it’s got a name or a description in English right now, you’ll need to translate it. We’ve made sure that RezTrip is forgiving in this regard, so if you forget to load a name in another language, it will default to your default language.

3. Flip.to social marketing. Travel Tripper has partnered with Flip.to—in our mind one of the most interesting social marketing tools in the hospitality industry—to provide yet another means for building buzz for your hotel.

Flip.to lets you entice guests—after they’ve made a booking on RezTrip, but before they view the confirmation—to share their upcoming trip with friends on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. The key is that Flip.to tracks how many leads an individual booker has generated. This opens the door to creating results-based incentives for your guests. For example, reward guests with a free night if their posts or tweets result in 10 of their friends signing up for your newsletter.

4. RezTrip rates and inventory can now be managed through EZYield and RateTiger. We love the RezTrip admin and Rate Grid, but we know that you aren’t always eager to manage another external system. We’ve partnered with the EZYield and RateTiger channel management tools so that RezTrip’s rates and inventory can be managed alongside your other channels, in a single place.

5. Travel tripper is now PCI-DSS compliant.Or in other words, Travel Tripper now meets the credit card industry’s security standards as a level-2 service provider. This means that our servers and your data are air-tight.

Travel Tripper goes a giant leap beyond the requirements of PCI-DSS in a very important way: we do not store credit card data for any longer than is necessary to deliver the payment information to you. Once you’ve received a reservation notification, by e-mail and / or XML, you will be the sole custodian of the credit card data.

As part of PCI-DSS, we’ve had to tighten down security policy in a few noticeable areas:

• You’re now required to have a strong password, and to change your password every 90 days
• When creating users, RezTrip will now auto-generate a password and send a notification e-mail to the user. When they log in for the first time, they’ll be asked to change their password
• If you don’t log in to RezTrip for 90 days, your account will be disabled (let us know, and we’ll let you back in)
• If you retrieve credit card numbers from the RezTrip admin via the secure token/link you receive with reservation notifications, please note:

You will need to retrieve card numbers for bookings made before April 12 by July 25. And going forward, card numbers must be retrieved no later than one week after the guest’s departure.

6. Cascade of yield controls on the rate grid is now optional. You can now choose whether or not you want to cascade yield controls when loading rates and inventory. If you’ve set two-night minimums on just a few of your floating rate plans, now you can update pricing across all your floating rates without overwriting that two-night minimum you previously set up. This is also helpful if you yield your higher room categories different than your standards but still want to take advantage of RezTrip’s simple rating tools.

The quick-fill bar on the rate grid now also lets you decide whether or not to fill in yield controls.

7. Reztrip RezTrip can now be accessed via shorter URLs. The only URLs you’ll need are yourhotel.reztrip.com and yourhotel.reztrip.com/admin/ and now you’ll be able to remember them without a bookmark!

8. LMS / HTNG 2-way reservations & ARI interface. RezTrip’s 2-way HTNG 2008A interface for sending reservations and receiving availability, rates and inventory was recently certified for use with Agilysys’s LMS property management system. This is in addition to our Opera OXI interface noted below. We’re moving full steam ahead with connectivity work, so please let us know your connectivity needs and continue to watch this space.

9. Run reports for longer date ranges. We’ve heard you loud and clear in this regard, and since RezTrip continues to become more and more performant, you can now run reports for longer date ranges.

This week’s update of course still includes the many features and enhancements from previous releases. Here are just a few highlights:

Collaborative shopping and travel planning with Facebook & Twitter. Guests and shoppers can share their current search or even their basic reservation details, e.g. “I’m staying at your hotel from July 20-21.” It’s also possible to post or tweet a link to any RezTrip promotional landing page. Please look for the e-mail, permalink, Facebook and Twitter buttons in the RezTrip shopping cart and on landing pages.

Ability to sell fenced rates (restricted by access code) on RezTrip promotional landing pages. Landing pages are key for tight integration with your online marketing campaigns. Now you can not only tightly funnel traffic to landing pages on RezTrip, but also restrict access to specific promotional rates by a code which the guest must enter.

Support for third-party web analytics & tracking. We know how important it is to know the ROI on your marketing spend. Travel Tripper provides built-in support for Google Analytics, but now we can also implement third-party analytics and tracking scripts in addition to GA.

Micros Opera OXI interface. RezTrip can send reservations to Micros Opera via the OXI interface. This interface is officially certified and supported by Micros, so please contact your Micros rep if you’re interested in having RezTrip deliver reservations to Opera.

Performance enhancements. We’ve made continual improvements to the speed and responsiveness of RezTrip, including faster initial load times, availability searches and reservations. We have also made huge strides with the responsiveness of the admin’s rates and inventory page, aka the “Rate Grid.”

Infrastructure & IT improvements. The Travel Tripper engineering team is constantly at work to ensure that RezTrip resides on rock-solid infrastructure. We’ve improved logging of client-side errors; we’ve optimized the database in many areas; core components of the app including GWT and MySQL have been upgraded to the latest versions. We have also scaled up our infrastructure as we add customers, so rest assured we’ll only continue to improve in this area.

And of course, there’s still much, much more to come!

Thanks for reading, and also for your help in making RezTrip what it is—the smarter booking engine!

Note from Scott

1^st Annual Customer Forum

On April 29^th, RevUp hosted about 40 customers at a ½ day meeting at the Park Central Hotel in New York.    This is the first of a series of direct discussions that RevUp management is having with our customers to share our direction and solicit your feedback.  Here is a recap of this well received event:

• RevUp operations have been integrated into those of its sister company Travel Tripper.  This change gives RevUp more scale to support customer needs going forward

• Ursula Nehr introduced Get Satisfaction, an online collaboration tool that RevUp has enabled for customer interaction with one another and the RevUp staff.  We will be adding articles and questions to this tool so please subscribe or check it frequently.  You can access the Get Satisfaction tool at www.getsatisfaction.com/traveltripper or here.  Please contact Ursula with any questions about this new tool.

• Gary Bogachkov reviewed recent RevUp  product enhancements.  Please review the release notes and newsletters at traveltripper.com or ask us if you want more information.

• Gary then discussed product enhancements currently in work.  Some of these have been completed in the past month since the Forum; please read Gary’s product recap in this newsletter for specifics.

• RevUp solicited customer feedback on its future product ideas and asked for additional product suggestions.  Customers then ranked all the ideas, and Ursula calculated the overall priority rankings for the group.

The Revvy Awards

At the customer forum, RevUp held its First Revvy Awards ceremony – recognizing accomplishments of note amongst our customers.

In addition to some mock awards (thanks for those who accepted these with good humor!), RevUp recognized Louise Parsons from On The Ave Hotel as Revenue Manager of the Year

Thanks to everyone who attended the forum in person or via web conference.

Travel Tripper Product Update

Travel Tripper continues to add valuable features to its RezTrip booking engine.  Some recent enhancements include:

• Completion and certification of a one way (reservation delivery) interface to Micros Fidelio’s Opera PMS and CRS
• Completion and certification of a two way (reservation delivery and availability/rates/inventory update) interface to Agylisys’ LMS PMS
• Enabling shoppers to announce offers on Facebook and Twitter at several points in the shopping process

• Integration with Nor1 eStandby Upgrade platform

RevUp Product Update

June

• Sub-segments in pace/pickup/forecat (ongoing pilot)
• Receiving reservation data from Autoclerk PMS (ongoing pilot)
• Rate Recommendation Reports

July

• Market Demand Historical Analysis
• Integrated User-Help/Manual

Aug

• Enabling multiple competitive sets for Rubicon Price Position

Further Out

• Improved Event/Demand Tracking
• Customizable Dashboard & Report Settings
• Improved Dashboard Reports
• Automated Reservation-Level Data Imports
• Additional Data Sources (Air, Destination, Lead-Time)

*Revup Revenue SmackDown Update*

At the Customer Forum, participants were challenged with the Revenue SmackDown challenge.  Our contestants were divided in 7 groups & were given access to RevUp data for a mystery hotel.  The contestants were asked to use RevUp’s Pace & Daily Sensitivity Reports to predict Occ % & ADR in advance for May 24th, 2011.

The initial winner of the challenge was group #2 & their prediction of 85% Occ & $315 ADR.  This answer was very close to Revup’s system forecast of 85% Occ & ADR of $295.

As promised during the Forum, here is an update based on the actual hotel occupancy and ADR on May 24th:

May 24th, 2011 actuals

OCC 97.48%

ADR $325.56

& the *new* winner is group #7: Yuki Yokoyama, Louise Parsons, Brian Christensen, Raymond Tang with their answer of 96% OCC & $325 ADR.

Congratulations!!!

*New RevUp Weekly Market Snapshot*

Each Monday, RevUp will share some insights about market demand in New York City and San Francisco for upcoming periods.  Look for these updates at http://www.traveltripper.com/travel-tripper-news

Key Contacts

More details at hotelblogs

System Forecast

• RevUp now forecasts at the segment level.  Simply click on the Transient, Group, or Contract tabs on the Forecast page to view the forecast for any of the three segments.  Note that this segmented forecasting will only apply to hotels who are providing PMS data to Revup at the segment level
• The System Forecast includes a day-of-week (DOW) column

Pace Report

• RevUp has made several improvements to the fonts and layout of the report
• The report now includes a new set of columns showing the pickup variance for the previous year.  Pickup variance is defined as the number of rooms sold from the current day through the end of the current month last year for each stay date during that month

Daily Sensitivity Analysis and Sensitivity by Range

• RevUp now suppresses missing rates from the competitive rate shopping data instead of showing those rates as zero
• The default initial view for both reports is now Occ% vs Sell Rate

System Navigation

• Tabs and links are streamlined throughout
• System Forecast has been added as a link on the second level of the menu

Note From Scott

Hello Travel Tripper and RevUp customers!

Welcome to 2011 and the first combined Travel Tripper/RevUp newsletter.  I am the Executive Vice President of Travel Tripper – a sister company of RevUp, and it’s my great pleasure to write to all of you.  Feel free to read my Linked In profile here to learn about my professional background.

RevUp and Travel Tripper have decided to combine certain operations, which is why you are reading my words and not those of Mark Allen.  Mark, who has been instrumental in driving RevUp over the past 2 years, is relinquishing his day to day role with the company and is moving into an advisory position. Ursula and Gary are still leading customer service and product management respectively, so we will not lose momentum with RevUp product or customer initiatives.

I am very excited to be working more closely with the RevUp team and its customers.  My primary goal for RevUp is simple:  to drive significant competitive advantage for hotels who use our product.  The whole team is very passionate about RevUp because we feel it serves an important, large segment of the market:  hoteliers who want to empower strong, passionate revenue managers to flourish in their jobs.  We have a robust enhancement pipeline for RevUp that will drive ever-increasing value for our customers, and I look forward to hearing your feedback and ideas for RevUp over the coming weeks.

In addition to the RevUp updates, we have other great content in this newsletter, including an update of Travel Tripper’s new booking engine – RezTrip 2.0.  RezTrip is driving measurable financial benefit to our hotels – as you can see from two news releases:  here and here.

If you have any questions about either product, feel free to contact us by phone, email, or carrier pigeon.  Thanks and happy maximizing!

Scott Brodows (scott@traveltripper.com)

Travel Tripper Product Update

RezTrip 2.0 overview

Version 2.0 of RezTrip^TM is now available to hotels the world over.  The industry’s best hotel merchandising engine enables properties to easily create and manage an unlimited number of promotions and packages.  Hotels can sell rooms and add-ons using both images and text and prompt guests to upgrade rooms or lengthen their stay before finalizing  bookings.  RezTrip even enables guests to share their hotel search results with friends and family to collaborate on group trips.

RezTrip 2.0 coming features

Travel Tripper has a very full product pipeline, including the following features to be deployed over the next few months:

• Certified reservation delivery interface (one-way) to Micros-Fidelio’s Opera PMS and CRS
• Certified reservation delivery and ARI interface (two-way) to Agylisys’ LMS Property Management System
• Support for multiple languages on consumer-facing booking engine
• Integration with nor1 Upgrade product
• Social media integration

RevUp Product Update

Key Contacts

Children and Brands are being smothered

Parenting has changed a lot in the last 30 years.   When my generation was young, our parents would send us outside to play for hours at a time and we’d sometimes come home bloody and bruised.  This was all part of growing up, and we matured better for having these experiences.  Today parents don’t want their kids getting even a bruised ego.  There are no winners or losers in soccer games, every kid is better than average, and bullying is a crime deserving of the death penalty.

Similarly, hotel brand management has changed a lot.  Not so long ago, brand managers weren’t afraid to take risks with their brand (remember this ad).  Today each image, word, and mention of a brand is highly scrutinized and passed through a detailed review process.  There are teams of lawyers ready to pounce if someone “steals” a brand for any unapproved usage. 

Stay near home

Back in the day, if we tried to hang out in the house we were shooed away so our parents could get some peace and quiet.   Today parents don’t let kids out of their sight for fear of unseen dangers both physical and emotional.

Brand owners as well used to allow their brands more freedom by exposing them to lots of different people.  Customers would decide for themselves whether a brand was a good fit, and vote with their purchasing behavior.  These days, brands only market to the “right” audience through micro-targeting efforts.  If you live in a certain area and watch certain TV channels there are some brands who just don’t want you.

For both children and brands, there is no substitute for life experience.  Brands need to experiment in new segments to find growth avenues.  As tastes and demographics change these experiments are the best way to successfully evolve.  And brands that don’t evolve tend to die.

Friends must be approved

For better or worse, we used to find our own friends.  Our parents liked some of the kids we hung out with, but some kids our parents greeted with folded arms and a scowl.  Parents today carefully “screen” their kids’ friends, and Sally Goodmom will only let little Janie and Johnie play with children she has interviewed and approved.  

Brand owners similarly now will only associate with “like minded” brands if any at all.  Companies used to experiment with eclectic partnerships, dating and breaking up with one another fairly rapidly (Hertz was part of UAL for a short while and later was owned by Ford) but now the only pairings we see are very carefully established and tend to be with very safe, known brands (like Starbucks in airport terminals and hotel lobbies).

Again this overprotection stifles potential brand growth.  By reaching out to consumers of other brands, the brand manager can expand and evolve her own brand. 

No one else can raise my kids

I received some of the sternest parenting from adults who were not my parents.  If I was at a friend’s house and misbehaved, these people gave no thought to telling me what’s what.  Today we think only we know what’s best for our kids, and other adults need to be completely neutral when it comes to our precious babes.

The most upset I see brand owners is when someone else “uses” their brand without permission.  How dare company X buy ads for Google searches for my brand names!!  Now here the brand owners are acting property, correct?  Not so fast.  It’s well known that travel buyers shop around multiple sites.  If your brand is advertising on Google (and your competitor is paying to advertise your brand!) you will

Bottom Line

Brand Managers like parents need to give their kiddos some freedom.  Children and brands need to grow and evolve, and if you control them too tightly they will become insulated, suffocate and be unable to relate to an ever-changing world.  To achieve their full potential both children and brands need to experiment, explore, and take risks.