Hotel Company Website Evaluation

MY COMPANY WEBSITE EVALUATION

My Company Website Evaluation

Barbara Sanders

EBUS/400

James Sternieri

Abstract

This paper describes how e-Business has influenced the Hotel/Travel Industry, the Importance of Supply chain management (SCM) and Customer Relations Management (CRM). The Holiday Inn Hotel where I am currently employed is used as an example.

My Company Website Evaluation

About ten years ago, most hotels had a fully staffed reservation department which was composed of a reservation manager, assistant manager, a supervisor and around 4 to 6 agents depending on the size of the hotel. The internet has caused quite a few changes in the way hotels conduct their business, for example, hotels now use a centralized system to book their reservations. Potential guests looking to book a room can either call a toll free number or book directly on the Internet.

Consumers that visit the Holiday Inn website can expect a user friendly environment, the site provides certain criteria that consumers are interested in when looking for a hotel room such as rates and availability, locations, specific room features, amenities and even provides Information of the surrounding area. The information is so plentiful, almost as if you were actually at the location you are Inquiring about, many people use the Internet to book travel arrangements because of the convenience of having the necessary information available and at hand..

The Internet also is responsible for the creation of other e-Businesses such as "Priceline,com", "Orbitz", and "Expedia" just to name a few, these e-Businesses contract with major hotel and travel chains to sell hotel reservations, airline seats, cruise cabins, and car rentals for these companies at a contracted rate in which the e-business charges the customer a price that will cover the cost of the reservation and make a profit for the e-business at the same time, these type of businesses are beneficial to travelers because they are usually paying less than what they would have paid if they booked directly with the company that actually owns the business in most cases.

The Internet has also simplified the accounting process, customer relationship management {CRM} and supply chain management {SCM}. In 1972, SAP was started by five former IBM employees in Mannheim, Germany. The original idea was to provide customers the ability to interact with a common corporate database for a comprehensive range of applications. Today, many companies are using SAP to run their businesses. SAP applications provide the capability to manage financial, asset, and cost accounting, production operations and materials, personnel, plants, and archived documents. {http://www.sap.com/community/pub/events/2006}

SAP has recently recast its product offerings under a comprehensive Web interface, called mySAP.com, and added new e-business applications, including customer relationship management (CRM) and supply chain management (SCM). CRM (customer relationship management) is an information industry term for methodologies, software, and usually Internet capabilities that help an enterprise manage customer relationships in an organized way. For example, an enterprise might build a database about its customers that described relationships in sufficient detail so that management, salespeople, people providing service, and perhaps the customer directly could access information, match customer needs with product plans and offerings, remind customers of service requirements, know what other products a customer had purchased, and so forth. {http://www.sap.com/community/pub/events/2006}

* Supply chain management (SCM) is the oversight of materials, information, and finances as they move in a process from supplier to manufacturer to wholesaler to retailer to consumer. Supply chain management involves coordinating and integrating these flows both within and among companies. It is said that the ultimate goal of any effective supply chain management system is to