Friday, July 09, 2004

Active Hotels launches new web-site to meet increased consumer demand - 30-Jun-04.

Active Hotels launches new web-site to meet increased consumer demand - 30-Jun-04.: ", Cambridge, 30th June 2004: Active Hotels has launched www.activereservations.com, its new hotel booking site, following extensive research into consumer needs and behaviour.

The site has a number of innovative features and includes unbiased feedback from recent guests who have stayed in the properties. In addition, the site focuses on cutting unnecessary browsing time, and ensures accurate, rapid, intelligent searches across an extensive network of 7,000 European hotels, ranging from B&B’s to 5 star luxury properties.

As a leading European hotel reservation provider, Active Hotels processes over 0.2 billion room nights per annum and has direct relations with all of its hotels, ensuring a superior quality service can be delivered, as well as excellent prices and availability.

Luke Errington, Consumer Team Manager said: “Our internal research shows that 98% of our customers have indicated that they are likely to recommend our web-site which is exceedingly encouraging. Our goal is to continue to grow user-confidence by improving and building new features into the site so that customers trust us to find the right hotel at the right price.”

A highlight of the new site is the ‘Guest Review’ initiative, recently launched to help improve levels of trust amongst browsers. By sending an email questionnaire to guests after they have checked out of their hotels, Active Reservations has been able to collate unique data to display on-line. The questionnaire asks for a rating on a number of guest experiences such as the on-line booking process, the quality of service, order and cleanliness of the hotel, overall value for money etc. Subsequently the scores are posted on www.activereservations.com for the relevant hotel, helping to inspire confidence that a chosen hotel will meet expectations. With over 500 hotels being reviewed every day, the service is proving indispensable for users.

Another principle feature of the site is fast-track searching. In addition to specifying a location, a user can further filter their search by ticking a choice of check-boxes such as ‘free parking’, ‘internet facilities’, ‘swimming pool’ etc. The search will then return all hotels in their chosen location which have these facilities available.

Furthermore, should users misspell a location the search function will return sensible suggestions in anticipation of what is truly being searched for. This particular feature has been developed to assist with searching for foreign or complicated place names.

As a result of Active Hotels’ commitment to market research and continued investment in developing smart but simple search interfaces, www.activereservations.com will be continually improved and a number of additional new features will be made available over the coming months. The aim is to lead the industry with innovative features that enable consumers, hotels and affiliates to benefit.

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About Active Hotels
Active Hotels is Europe’s leading online reservations provider, offering the best choice of hotels and room prices available across Europe via its booking interface: www.activereservations.com. The company works with 7,000 leading European hotels, which it promotes across hundreds of distribution partner websites and electronic networks.

Active Hotels is rapidly growing its hotel base to reach over 10,000 European properties by the end of 2004. The company is predicted to process over €200 million worth of bookings for hotels throughout Europe in 2004.
For further information visit: www.activehotels.com

Press contact
Mandy Zakhour, European Media Relations & Communications, Active Hotels
Tel: +44 (0)1223 578134 Email: mandy@activehotels.com

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