Travel Dynamics International (TDI) provides luxury cruises based around cultural and educational themes. For 10 years, the company relied on a custom-built reservation and booking system. However, this system lacked built-in tools for sales, marketing, and customer service. Employees used a variety of nonintegrated applications to perform daily tasks, restricting TDI’s ability to automate processes to improve efficiency. After spending an average of U.S.$50,000 a year to maintain its aging system, the company opted to implement a customer relationship management system. TDI chose Microsoft Dynamics® CRM based on its ease of use and the flexibility offered through xRM, the application development framework that underpins the solution. Now, TDI has seen a four-fold increase in workforce productivity, improved its customer service, and projects year-over-year sales growth of 10 percent.

Seattle’s Hotel 1000 constantly seeks to differentiate itself through leading-edge technology and a personalized guest experience. This helps increase on-property spending and repeat visits for both business and leisure travelers. One of the ways that the hotel achieves its goal is through unique technologies, including one of the first customized installations of the Microsoft® Surface® software and computing platform. Using this multitouch, multiuser device, guests can access a virtual concierge, share photos and videos, and view hotel offerings. Guests gather and become friends around Microsoft Surface for a truly interactive, collaborative, and enjoyable experience that nurtures guest loyalty.

To its 3.8 million guests each year, the Carnival Cruise Line fleet of 23 ships epitomizes leisure. For the 37,000 employees responsible for providing all that fun and relaxation, e-mail is a business-critical communication channel used to relay important information between ship and shore, as well as between employees and guests. Carnival faced a challenge as its messaging solution became more cumbersome to manage, particularly in terms of disaster recovery and solution administration. In August 2009, Carnival joined the Microsoft® Rapid Deployment Program and deployed a pilot of Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 to evaluate how to improve its existing environment. After deploying the pilot, Carnival found that it would be able to improve system recovery and availability, ease administration, and improve its employees’ communication experience.

Sportsnet Holidays needed a customer relationship management (CRM) solution to handle data that was spread among 220 separate databases. Sportsnet implemented Microsoft Dynamics® CRM, which dramatically improved customer service, business intelligence and target marketing capabilities. The firm’s revenue has doubled in the last 12 months and Sportsnet credits Microsoft Dynamics CRM as a contributing factor to the company’s exponential growth.

VisitBrighton, the tourist board for the seaside city of Brighton and Hove, needed to redesign its Web site to make it a more useful, compelling resource for visitors. It worked with e-tourism solutions provider New Mind to create a site based around Bing™ Maps for Enterprise. With unique features such as bird’s eye view and Photosynth built in, the new site brings Brighton to life for visitors, helping boost local business bookings by 120 per cent.

Courtyard by Marriott is designed to meet the needs of business travelers. To achieve its mission of providing services and amenities that improve the guest experience, Courtyard redesigned its hotel lobbies. A central element of the redesign is the GoBoard™, a large-format touch screen based on Microsoft® products and technologies. The GoBoard gives guests convenient, real-time access to news, weather, and travel information and features interactive maps that help guests find their way to local points of interest. Since completing the lobby redesign and deploying the GoBoard, Courtyard has found that hotel staff interacts with guests more easily and reports a 10 percent rise in guest satisfaction scores and a 27 percent increase in intent-to-return scores. The comprehensive redesign, including the GoBoard, has helped Courtyard increase market share by 7.5 percent since deployment.

Enhancing the guest experience is central to the corporate mission at Vail Resorts, but ski lift pass authentication for season pass holders was often a time-consuming process due to passes being worn under layers of winter clothing. In addition, the company had little visibility into the skiing patterns of its guests. Vail Resorts switched to season passes embedded with radio frequency (RF) tags that can be scanned through a skier’s jacket, streamlining the pass-holder authentication process. The company also placed RF scanners on upper-mountain lifts to capture lift access data that helps sharpen targeted marketing. The solution uses Microsoft® BizTalk® Server RFID and SQL Server® 2005 to handle authentication transactions, SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services for data analysis, and Windows® Communication Foundation for point-to-point data exchange.

Galaxy Hotel is an elite spa hotel in Gurgaon, India, serving thousands of guests annually. The hotel offers a varied selection of services and accommodations – all highly dependent on computing systems to run efficiently. Recently, the company noticed an increase in computing crashes that took systems offline for long periods. In addition, it experienced data loss due to improper system shutdown, slowing business processes and threatening to impact the guest experience. The company needed a way to stabilize its systems and improve information security, while speeding up business processes. By deploying the Windows® 7 Professional operating system, Galaxy was able to increase system stability and performance and reduce downtime, while increasing productivity and safeguarding customer information.

Employees at ClubLink, a Canadian operator of golf courses, collaborated with each other only by phone or e-mail. These communications methods slowed IT support and contact-center responses and made mobile workers hard to reach. In addition, frequent employee travel to meetings and training sessions cost money and reduced productive hours. With help from LegendCorp, a Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner, ClubLink deployed a unified communications solution based on Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 and Microsoft Office Communicator 2007. Now, presence awareness and instant messaging help ClubLink employees contact co-workers and collaborate in real time, and conferencing reduces the need for travel. By using the new solution, ClubLink has cut decision-making time from days to minutes in some cases and reduced telephone use by 10 percent.

Agilysys, Inc., a solution provider to the hospitality industry, sought to grow its market share, but the company’s core software only ran on System i and Visual Basic, a drawback for customers on the Microsoft® .NET environment. Agilysys needed a cross-platform solution and chose LANSA. The new system provided complete functionality and offered customers improved agility and more features.