It Strategy

Information Managament at Homestyle Hotels

Homestyle Hotels Inc. is a company that formed from the uniting of Lifestyle Resorts and Home-Away Hotels. Before this uniting every hotel has their own hardware and software to keep data of their customers. Even Lifestyle Resorts and Home-Away Hotels didn’t have a centeral system to check and compare data. Hotel managers were responsible for pricing and customer information. When Ben Garrett joins Homestyle Hotels as information services director, he had a rough way to set things up. The COO Fred Gains called this situation unacceptable. Of course a national brand needs a good centeral information system. The first meetings was about current data keeping systems. They anaylzed every hotel and their softwares. They saw that everyone has different way of keeping data, and they have different priorities on the information. They made several meetings to mean these information. Having such meeting to collect ideas from every hotel and each company is really improtant to implement a matching system to your needs. They decided to have a software and force hotels to comply its data definitions. This method is not really a wise choise for a company which tries to create a national brand. They already had meetings about their needs, they determined the problems, but they search solution from some other company’s impositions. A major brand need its own solutions for different situations. At the end they came up with two different softwares; Hotels Confidential which has good information protection and Clear Reservation which has beter managment applications. They arrenged presentations from both software companies. Hotels Confidential mentioned about their products multi-layered access system, security of customer data, on the other hand Clear Reservation showed their products easy use and visual design. After presentations there was a conflict, half of the board supports for HC and other half for CR. Some of the key concerns...