Boca Raton, FL – January 11, 2010 – Cendyn, a leading single-source provider of innovative turnkey online marketing solutions that increase profitability for multiproperty hotel companies, today introduced Customer Order Center that enables event meeting planners to create and place complete food and beverage orders online for greater efficiency. The new system enhances Cendyn’s eco-friendly eMenus™ catering solution by displaying customized website ordering pages with standardized menu selections accompanied by attractive photos with multimedia elements that provide enticing menu options.
Starwood selects Customer Order Center
Starwood Hotels & Resorts selected eMenus with Customer Order Center for use by all its domestic properties. “We wanted a key customer deliverable that propelled Starwood’s Convention Services and Catering Operations to the next level and met the needs of our operations in becoming more efficient and easy to do business with,” said David Dvorak, vice president of catering & convention services for Starwood Hotels & Resorts, which piloted Cendyn’s Customer Order Center introduction. “eMenus and the Customer Order Center are clearly the future of Banquets and Catering and we are pleased to lead the industry in this technology.”
Starwood is now rolling out the solution to its 240+ enrolled domestic properties. “Event planners who work with Starwood say they appreciate the system’s ease of use and the control they have by creating their food and beverage orders online in a standardized format when it is most convenient for them. We anticipate a much wider use of the Internet in banquet and event booking in the future,” Dvorak said.
More than 3,000 hotels rely on Cendyn’s eSales SuiteTM hotel Internet marketing platform with eMenus that leverages the Internet to drive sales online. eMenus and Customer Order Center are multi-lingual for use by international hotel operators.
Photos of menu items drive faster decisions, offer attractive options
Response to eMenus’ new Customer Order Center is very positive, according to Robyn Deyo, executive vice president of Cendyn. “Hotels today are working more often with planners on smaller corporate meetings and family-focused events like weddings and bar mitzvahs,” she said. “The Customer Order Center provides even novice event planners with a quick and easy way to do business efficiently. When menu items are ordered from a website, the property can help planners make decisions with attractive graphics, videos and music. The age of lifeless print menus is over.”
The new eMenus Customer Order Center puts the food and beverage selection process in meeting planners’ hands with help from an attractive online application that eliminates the need to email large file attachments. In the past, planners could view event menus online, but had to place their F&B orders by email, phone or fax. Customer Order Center maintains each menu item for breakfast, lunch, dinner, breaks and special activities such as weddings, in a central database with pricing, titles and other customizable attributes. Meeting planners can select standard menus with associated costs, while they view upgrade options with separate pricing on the same page. eMenus totals each order with extensions and adds appropriate fees for labor, minimums, and taxes for a complete bid. When the planner is finished, they click a button that sends their selection to the hotel catering manager who reviews the menus and quickly provides a banquet event order (BEO) as the legal agreement.
eMenu’s Customer Order Center provides:
- A standardized, streamlined order process for food and beverage booking
- Quick and easy menu updates and multiple opportunities to add specialty items
- More accurate orders through elimination of manual keying errors
- Reduced printing and distribution cost.
“eMenus Customer Order Center creates a more efficient ordering process by letting planners ‘clone’ their current orders for future events and replicate them or refine them slightly without having to reinvent the entire process,” said Deyo. “The system makes it easy for event planners to build their own customized menus for certain events, which helps them differentiate themselves from their competition and offer more distinctive services to their clients. Being able to offer this feature is a major differentiator for hotels in today’s competitive marketplace.”
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About Cendyn
Cendyn, based in Boca Raton, Florida, leads the hospitality industry in broadening revenue by applying a managed services culture and approach to a single source of integrated solutions uniquely proven in the hospitality and tourism market.
Established in 1996, Cendyn is a full-service interactive sales and marketing agency whose solutions are used by over 9,000 hotel and travel destinations worldwide. The company is a solid resource of hospitality professionals who innovate solutions that include website marketing, website design, branding, search engine marketing and interactive products such as eProposal™, eConcierge™, eSurvey™, eInsight™, eContact™, eConnectivity™, eBooker™, and eMenus™. Clients include Starwood Hotels & Resorts, Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, Hyatt Hotels and Resorts, Hilton Family of Hotels, Marriott and other chains and independent properties. Cendyn, the recipient of prestigious awards for website design, innovation and marketing programs, extends its “Power of We” culture into the community through sponsorships of the YMCA, youth teams and community outreach; the Boca Helping Hands food bank; George Snow Scholarship Fund; Boca Raton Historical Society; Florence Fuller Childhood Development Centers, and community projects of the Junior League of Boca Raton. To learn how Cendyn’s products and services may broaden your revenue base, please visit our websitewww.cendyn.com. Let Cendyn show you how far an idea can go!
