Sceptre Hospitality Resources

today announced their new Internet Booking Engine (IBE) which will be released to the industry in April 2014. The new IBE includes responsive design, a shopping cart style booking process, persuasive messaging, and the brand new Call-to-Continue™ feature, among other exclusive functions.

"It's exciting to see the result of months of collaborative work between our design and development

teams. We're listening to our clients as we re-define the booking experience. We want to provide hoteliers with better tools to engage the guest and merchandise their offerings. At the same time, we are addressing more complex conversion scenarios which involve multiple contexts and multiple devices," said Angelo Directo, VP of Design for SHR.

The design and development teams took a fresh approach to the new booking engine to capture

conversion and prevent abandonment. The release marks the first real shopping cart experience for hotel booking engines and it includes multiple features to help hotels convert cross-context and mobile visits to the booking engine. These features include the Save for Later and Call to Continue™ options.

Save for Later

If guests are not ready to book, they can save their cart by simply entering an e-mail address. A link

to their cart will then be sent to them to complete the booking process at a later time. Hotels can also use this feature to target these guests in future e-mail campaigns to re-engage their attention and increase bookings.

Call to Continue

If a mobile guest has added items to their cart, but would prefer not to enter their information online to

complete the booking, he has the option to call to continue by simply touching a number on the device. This feature sends the reservation information to the hotel's call center with a unique Cart ID that allows the reservation agent to pick up where the guest left off and complete the booking.

To facilitate promotions and up-selling, the new booking engine offers a Discount Code field on the

shopping cart and checkout screens. These screens also highlight any discounts the guest has already received during the booking process.

Add-ons are not new to SHR's booking engines, but the new IBE allows items to be added in the cart

view-even if the itinerary is multi-room and multi-property. Guests have the option of viewing their itinerary costs in an easy to read and understand Summary or Detail format.

The new IBE is fully optimized for single property independents, multi-property groups, and large hotel

brands. SHR helps multi-property groups and large hotel brands cross-sell with features such as a comparison view, the ability for a guest to book multiple rooms, even different rooms types, multiple stays across many properties in one transaction, and suggestive selling prompts located in the cart view.

If your hotel or hotel chain is interested in more information, please contact SHR at [email protected]

About SHR

Founded in 2004, and headquartered in Houston, Texas, with offices in Europe and Asia-Pacific, SHR Group is a leading global specialist technology and service provider to the hotel sector. Helping hoteliers to maximize revenue by optimizing all aspects of the booking and retention eco-system through a full suite of tools, including the groundbreaking allora.ai platform, over 2,000 hotels globally use SHR Group's product suite to optimize their channel mix and personalize guest experiences. To learn more, visit https://shrgroup.com/.

SHR supports 1500+ independent, group, casino and long-stay hotels, manage 6.6M reservations, sell 19m room nights and drive £2 billion revenue per year through its Windsurfer CRS, CRM and RMS.

Abbie Deaver
303.220.2168