Agilysys sets high standard for online room reservations

Agilysys is a leading technology company that provides innovative software solutions to the hospitality industry. Agilysys operates throughout North America, Europe and Asia, with corporate services located in Alpharetta, GA.

Agilysys provides Lodging Management System® (LMS), one of the world’s most popular integrated hotel and casino property management solutions. LMS automates every aspect of hotel operations, including reservations and credit card processing, accounting and housekeeping, sales and catering, activities scheduling, food and beverage sales, online reservations, remote check-in, spa scheduling and more.

LMS is especially suitable for large-scale hospitality and gaming operations and powers many of the largest hotels in the world, including many of the mega-hotel-casinos in Las Vegas, Macau and rest of the world.

Originally developed by IBM, LMS has been enhanced with LANSA-based web extensions since 1997, when the LMS ResNet solution became the first real-time, fully integrated on-line hotel booking system in the world. LMS ResNet provides secure access to up-to-date inventory availability, rating strategy, credit authorization and customer information.

Today, LMS and LMS ResNet are used by several hundred hotel and resort chains, both on-premise and in a SaaS environment. A significant percentage of hotel reservations worldwide are made via LANSA-based LMS ResNet.

Recent LMS ResNet enhancements include online and mobile check-in/check-out, dynamic, suggestive selling functionality, multiple room booking capabilities, web check-in improvements, a web check-out component and additional special request functionality.

The case study below captures the excitement at the time of adopting LANSA and LMS ResNet becoming the world’s first fully integrated on-line hotel booking system.

The original LMS property management and reservation modules were developed in RPG (an older type of development language for IBM i). LMS had grown to many million lines of code and includes interfaces to a variety of devices, such as point-of-sales terminals, telephone systems, keylock systems, in-room movies and services.

Criss Chrestman, Vice President Software and Services at Agilysys (and before that Director of Hospitality Development at Inter American Data, which was acquired together with LMS by Agilysys), explained “LMS provides an exceptional number of variations in rating, inventory management, and process flow. This flexibility is impossible for a third-party online reservation service to duplicate.”

“We are experts in the hospitality industry and didn’t want to become web development experts. We wouldn’t have considered making this online reservation solution ourselves without LANSA. We would have outsourced the task to web development specialists.”

“I am very glad we didn’t have to do that, because of the application limitations we would have had to impose. It took our existing LMS development team about two weeks to become productive with LANSA and learn how to create applications with the look we wanted.”

“LANSA provides great productivity benefits. New application modules and enhancements to LMS are now done with LANSA. It means we can continue to use our own knowledgeable IT team, rather than outsourcing web projects to a third-party without hospitality knowledge.”

“We have designed ResNet to be as ‘smart’ as possible, for example, by allowing it to be tailored to the individual requirements of each customer.”

“A self-service reservation solution that is not in synch with the room inventory availability, rating strategy, credit authorization, and customer information can cause a lot of inconvenience. The ability to work directly and securely with back-end data was one of the reasons we choose LANSA. LANSA also integrates tightly with existing functionality, allowing us to capitalize on our existing property management and credit card applications,” concludes Chrestman.

Company and System Information

• Agilysys is a leading technology company that provides innovative software and services for point-of-sale (POS), reservation and table management, property management (PMS), inventory and procurement, workforce management, analytics, document management, and mobile and wireless solutions exclusively to the hospitality industry.
• The LMS solution can be implemented in a SaaS environment, or on-premise.
• For more information visit: www.agilysys.com