Community User Groups Perugia, Italy

Recently e-HotelServices was invited to a user group meeting hosted by Hermes Hotels' dedicated IDS team held at the Villa Donini in Perugia. The two day meeting joined the expertise of three Cornell University School of Hotel Administration professors: Mark Talbert, Roy Alvarez and Gabriele Piccoli and a dozen carefully selected current users of the Hermes hotels internet distribution system.

Held in the picturesque surrounding of the Umbrian Hills, the Hermes Hotels team set thescene for learning, social interaction and enjoyment with a game of CHESS - the competitive hospitality education simulation system (More on CHESS below). Using a fun, interactive, hotel management simulation participants were charged with operating their own hotel accepting bookings, controlling yield of individual and group bookings, managing costs, staffing and service levels, are only some of the many realistic choices with which the group was faced. At the end of each "week" the results would be posted and strategies, tactics and learning points were discussed.

The course objectives were:

• Develop effective decision‐making skills with respect to rooms division
• Develop a value‐added perspective to rooms division
• Implement problem‐solving strategies in a realistic rooms division simulation
• Learn how to maximize yield from rooms division
• Learn how to accurately measure profitability in rooms division

All of which we accomplished over the all too short meeting. A big thank you to everyone and especially to Marco D'Amore and Roberto Santececca for organizing this and to Roy Alvarez, Mark Talbert, and Gabriele Piccoli for teaching us so much whilst keeping us entertained.

HermesHotels - An innovative IDS/GDS Provider

HermesHotels is an Advanced CRS that was developed from scratch in order to handle the On-Line distribution of a Hotel. HermesHotels is more than a classical CRS. Thanks to its two-way XML connections to third parties and its internal tools HermesHotels can be equalled to a Support Instrument for the electronic distribution of a Hotel. Through a single interface, a hotel can manage all their distribution partners, complex pricing policies, and special offers. HermesHotels Distribution Management System will effortlessly communicate with all your channels and avoid your staff having to log into multiple different extranets.

HermesHotels is also a GDS Provider, linking the Hotel to a distribution net with more than 600.000 Travel Agencies in the world. Thanks to the connection to the four GDSs, HermesHotels can guarantee constant marketing and sales activity to a consortia of business travellers, communication actions to travel agencies in order to promote the Hotel, and an ODD Pegasus interface for the On-Line travel agencies. All these are managed automatically by the system to continuously control pricing policies for each channel

http://www.hermeshotels.com/
http://www.athenasolutions.it/

Background on CHESS

During the course of the programme, participants apply the principles introduced in discussion sessions in their own computer based virtual hotels. Managers make critical pricing, inventory and resource allocation decisions as windows of opportunity open and close. There has simply never been a better way to illustrate the time critical nature of yield management decision making.
While CHESS is the very latest in hospitality management simulation, it is part of a long and distinguished evolution of management exercises, beginning with the Cornell Hotel & Restaurant Administration Exercises (CHASE & CRASE) which have been used successfully around the world for more than 30 years. CHESS incorporates all of the successful principles of Discovery Instruction pioneered by Cornell's CHASE and CRASE, as well as adding exciting dimensions of real-time activity and hand-on participation.

To find out more: http://chess-1.net/