Bookassist connects live to SoftBrands PORTfolio PMS

Bookassist and SoftBrands announced today that they have implemented a direct connection between the Bookassist online reservations system and the SoftBrands PORTfolio Property Management System allowing for live interaction from web to the reservations desk.

SoftBrands, Inc., a global supplier of enterprise application software, has significant traction in the Irish and UK marketplaces with PORTfolio PMS. Bookassist is the market leading Irish company for web-enabled hotel reservations. "Being able to marry the two systems together brings the best of both worlds to hoteliers", said Dr Des O'Mahony, Bookassist Managing Director. "Hoteliers with PORTfolio can now also have a feature rich Travel 2.0 booking engine online while significantly saving on effort in coordinating their offering and their online bookings with their PMS system".

Among the first adopters of the integration effort is the Mercer Hotel Group. "For more than three years we have been searching for a solution to how we can reduce the margin of error, reduce duplication of tasks and save our reservations resources to focus on revenue management.", said Michelle Doherty, Group Sales & Marketing Manager for Mercer Accommodation Group and the New Great Southern Group. "The Bookassist & SoftBrands integration works seamlessly, leaving us to focus on our core activities and not bogging us down in technical and system issues. This allows us to react much more quickly in a very challenging and competitive market place."

Bookassist XML reservations can be tied to any system that recognises Open Travel Alliance's OTA/XML standards.

Bookassist launches new corporate website

Bookassist has today launched a completely new corporate website on the bookassist.org domain to give comprehensive online information on Bookassist services and products and to integrate Hotel Industry blogs and client services in one single location.

"Bookassist corporate information has been a section of the bookassist.com website for years, but with so many visitors looking for direct information on Bookassist products and services, we felt that the corporate information was a little too hidden on the bookassist.com site. We wanted it more directly accessible and we felt it was time to revamp our product descriptions as well as showcase some great innovations that we've been responsible for over the years", said Mary Collins, Web Presence Team Leader. "Bookassist.com can be focused solely now on online marketing and promotion for our clients."

bookassist.org features clear and concise product information and service descriptions for the Booking Engine, Traffic Builder and Site Builder products. It also integrates significant hotel industry information as a general service for hotels, with Bookassist staff picking important information from the hospitality industry blogsphere for publication, as well as writing detailed how-to's and helpful hints for hotels in the online marketplace. "We've been working hard with our seminars and workshops for our client hotels in various countries to make sure they have expert information on dealing with sales and promotion online, but we're happy to share the company expertise to a more general audience also through our new corporate website blogs. Making this expertise available publicly is a pretty novel thing to do, and we plan on building this into a good resource for the hospitality industry", said Des O'Mahony, Bookassist co-founder and managing director.