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CCRA Check-In is distributed
bi-monthly to all of our hotel partners worldwide.
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29219 Canwood St.,
Suite 115
Agoura Hills, CA 91301
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Phone: 818.575.4300
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Fax: 818.889.4547
www.ccrainternational.com
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Director of Supplier Strategies
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Bill Lawrence
Director of Supplier Strategies
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Jolene Volkart
Sales Assistant
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Samuel Jinich
Programmer/Analyst,
RFP Services
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Marketing Coordinator
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CCRA Travel
Agency Partners
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2009 Sales Kit
2010 Sales Kit
Don't Take Our Word For It: |
"Our partnership with CCRA is essential to an overall increase in occupancy and revenue. Their professionalism is paramount to our success."
Linda Schilling
Director of Travel Industry Sales
Noble House Hotels and Resorts |
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"The CCRA marketing department is a huge help to us and easy to work with. As a result of their experience with our marketing, Harrah’s is looking forward to
2009 with CCRA!"
Brooke Johnson
Sales Manager
Harrah’s Las Vegas
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"CCRA offers a multitude of affordable opportunities. I continue to support CCRA marketing because of their large distribution channel. The ROI is realistic and achievable. They are cutting-edge in terms of marketing tool development!"
Colleen Kempf
National Director,
Travel Industry Sales
Omni Hotels
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"CCRA provides one of the widest and most economical platforms available to get our messages across to the global travel agency community. We value the relationship and appreciate the positive results
of their efforts."
David Kreindel
National Sales Director
Choice Hotels International
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It's never too late to get your rates in front of 50,000 travel agent decision makers!
Join our 2009 CCRA Hotel Rate Program.
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Message from Mai
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Dear Hoteliers,
A few words about 2010 …
Incredible as it may seem, it’s RFP season already. In the next few days we will be sending out our 2010 RFP. In addition to Lanyon and our own RFP tool, this year you may also use BidStork to complete your rate submission.
I am pleased to announce: THERE WILL BE NO PRICE INCREASE FOR PARTICIPATION IN 2010!
There will also be some exciting new marketing opportunities that will help you be more successful with the travel agent market.
Read about these new opportunities in our first article below … and look for the CCRA RFP in the next several days!
Straight from Las Vegas …
 The whole CCRA sales team is back from Las Vegas and the 11th annual Vacation.com Travel Show. This year over 800 travel agents gathered at Caesar’s Palace to learn what’s new in the travel market and how they can maximize their own effectiveness.
From an exciting new video at the opening session to a reprise at the closing ceremony, I am proud to say that CCRA and our travel partners / co-sponsors were everywhere.
We sponsored training classes on our reservation tool and hosted two days of ongoing sessions in the Experience room promoting our consortia rates at 28,000 hotels. We distributed a brochure the highlighted the travel agent promotions for each of our partners. We knocked ‘em dead at our tradeshow Pavilion where we and our travel partners gave away thousands of dollars in prizes … and we hosted a reception for our top producers.
Throughout the show, our message was simple … “Whether you use the GDS or our reservation portal, CCRA has the best solutions for your hotel needs. While other travel companies are cutting back, CCRA continues to introduce new programs and improved technology to support our agents.” Check-out the photos later in this issue.
Sincerely,
Mai Meyaart
Vice President and Managing Director
Download June IATA list
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Put More Heads in Beds ... CCRA Style
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Getting negotiated rates into the hands of tens of thousands of travel agents should be one of the most important elements of your corporate and leisure marketing strategies … so we urge you to get your RFP completed and submitted. And, in 2010, we have even more to offer!
NEW for 2010
CCRA has two new programs that will be part of your 2010 marketing opportunities. Each has been designed to help you boost occupancy and put more heads in beds.
FIRST PLACE
 First Place has been designed to help aggressive properties grab market share by purchasing premiere positioning on CCRAtravel.com. One hotel, and only one, can be featured first on the results page for every search for that location. The cost is just $1,000 per month. Unlike many sites, we don’t tie you into an annual contract. Monthly scheduling means you can position your property during peak purchasing seasons … you can be there when the customer wants to buy.
However, this is strictly a first-come-first-served opportunity. Remember, there can only be one hotel in first place!
CCRx from CCRA®
We have the prescription to improve your occupancy with our new, quarterly, travel agent feeder market report, CCRx from CCRA®.
 This new report has been designed to help you pinpoint your travel agent market so that you can effectively reach and capture this critical travel segment.
The report itself is an easy to interpret, one-page dashboard. Once you define your top five hotel competitors, we will show you how much CCRA travel agent business you are getting in comparison, as well as who are these agencies and where they are coming from?
In addition to the report, we will provide you with a written “prescription” that details the information that is available on the report and what you need to know to successfully market to this audience.
If your hotel’s occupancy has been feeling a little run-down lately, then CCRx from CCRA® is just what it needs to start feeling like its old self once again. With that in mind, we have priced CCRx from CCRA® to make it affordable. Each quarterly report will cost just $500. However, as part of a special offer, if you sign up for CCRx from CCRA® as part of the 2010 RFP – you’ll have the opportunity to purchase four reports for a discounted price of $1,500.
“At CCRA we continually strive to develop programs that will help our hotel partners be more successful,” says Mai Meyaart, VP and Managing Director. “That’s why we have created both CCRx from CCRA® and First Place, and why we have priced them so that they are within the reach of individual hotel partners.”
Click here for more information about these programs and the rest of CCRA's marketing opportunities. You may also contact Jolene Volkart, Sales Assistant at 817- 288-7207 or jolene.volkart@ccra.com.
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CCRA Returned to the Vacation.com Trade Show and Conference
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CCRA was proud to participate at the 11th Annual Vacation.com Conference and Trade Show in Las Vegas, June 15th – 19th. During the conference we unveiled CCRA’s new brand, CCRA Travel Solutions. We also had an opportunity to share our newest offerings on CCRAtravel.com: Got Groups? and CCRACa$hRewards. We have spent the first part of the year making our exclusive hotel booking tool better than ever. We continue to enhance our booking portal so that the thousands of agents who have registered to use it can easily find the hotel they want in the location they need.
Once again, this year, we hosted the CCRA Pavilion sponsored by fourteen of our top travel partners, educating agents on the latest property news and sharing gifts and prizes – including over $20,000 in hotel stays! We want to thank all our supplier partners for making our 11th appearance at the Vacation.com show so successful!
- Accor Hospitality
- Best Western
- Carey
- Carlson Worldwide
- Choice Hotels International
- Destination Hotels
- Endless Vacation Rentals
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- Fairmont Hotels and Resorts
- FiestAmericana (Posadas)
- Gaylord Hotels
- Hilton Hotels
- Intercontinental Hotel Group
- Millennium Hotels and Resorts
- Wyndham Hotel Group
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Click here to see more photos from the Vacation.com Trade Show. |
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Remember to be "Fun to do Business With" and Boost Your Clientele
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| Written by: Bill Todd
 Being known as “fun to do business with” is the single most powerful, yet least understood, competitive advantage available in the travel industry today.
Gain the Competitive Advantage
Tom Peters, America’s foremost business guru, states that 70% of all consumers would switch suppliers today if they could find one that was more fun to do business with. Being fun to do business with provides you with a distinct competitive advantage over your direct competitors.
Why? All things being equal, most people will choose to deal with someone who is fun to do business with over anyone else. All things not being equal, people would still rather deal with someone who is fun to do business with.
Shift Market Share
Just look at the annual load factors of Southwest Airlines. Let's face it, Southwest is not exactly an uncomplicated airline for travelers. They make their passengers stand in one line after another. They offer no aisle or window seat assignments, provide no lounges and extend no upgrades to their most frequent travelers. What makes them successful is that they are fun to fly with. Over the last two decades, no airline can rival the outstanding financial results of Southwest.
 Southwest enjoys a customer recommendation rating double the industry average and nearly seven times higher than that of United Airlines. So how do they do it? Southwest has a philosophy of first employing fun, talented people; they aim their recruiting ads to the whimsical, unconventional, and even the zany, to attract potential employees.
Jay Conrad Levinson, author of “Guerrilla Marketing For Free,” says, “Southwest’s marketing doesn’t work because it sells cheap flights and destinations. It works because it helps people realize the fun of flying Southwest.”
The best seller, “The Seven Deadly Skills of Competing,” states that, “If you can make your customers laugh, and excite them with your vision of what travel can be, they are not going to walk into your doors, but run into them. Making fun an important part of your corporate culture will trigger relentless innovation by your staff and rapidly increase your word of mouth advertising.”
Travel is too often perceived as something that must be endured. If you can mix fun and entertainment into your existing customer’s experience, your competition’s clients will soon hear about it. You will quickly shift market share, increase sales and drive profits.
Marvin Martinez, a bellman and front desk agent at the San Antonio River Walk Marriott, says, “We all bring out smiles in our own special way. Me, I’m a performer. Every day I’m on stage in front of my biggest fans, my guests. When I walk into the lobby, I’m on! I’m an aggressive hospitality animal.”
Boost Retention
According to Roshan Thiran, CEO of Leaderonomics, Fun is a critical element in employee retention; a fun workplace is a cure for employee turnover.
“A recent survey of employees showed that humor displayed by their manager increases their loyalty (retention) and productivity. Google, with its fun workplace, retains about 95% of their employees.
When people are having fun, they’re working harder, focused on your organization, and are able to maintain their composure in a crisis. If your organization is ready to catapult into the next level of business success, fun may just be your catalyst.”
Bill Todd is one of the travel industry’s most sought after sales motivational speakers and trainers. He is the co-author with Stephen Covey of Speaking of Success. www.BTodd.com |
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Consumer Confidence is Up in May
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 According to the most recent survey of The Conference Board (survey), consumer confidence which had increased significantly in April posted another large gain in May. In fact, the index level is now at its highest in the past eight months.
Says Lynn Franco, Director of The Conference Board Sonsumer Research Center, “…Looking ahead, consumers are considerably less pessimistic than they were earlier this year, and expectations are that business conditions, the labor market and incomes will improve in the coming months. While confidence is still weak by historical standards, as far as consumers are concerned, the worst is now behind us."
How does consumer confidence impact the economy?
Kimberly Amadeo, Publisher of WorldMoneyWatch.com, the international news guide for the individual investor, offers this explanation (definition), “Consumer confidence is important to the economy because consumer spending drives 70% of economic growth. If consumers are uncertain about the economy, they will buy less, and the economy will slow further. If consumer confidence increases, then the economy will grow.”
The Consumer Confidence Survey™ is based on a representative sample of 5,000 U.S. households. The monthly survey is conducted for The Conference Board by TNS. TNS is the world's largest custom research company. The cutoff date for May's preliminary results was May 19th.
Article source: The Conference Board Consumer Confidence Index™ is a trademark of The Conference Board, a global independent membership organization working in the public interest. (learn more)
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Meetings Mean Business ... and Jobs. You Can Help!
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Did you know that corporate travel creates 2.4 million jobs in the US and that meetings and events are directly responsible for 1 million American jobs?
 This is just one of the startling statistics about the importance of meeting related travel not just to the travel industry, but to the economy as a whole. It is a message that the Meetings Mean Business campaign plans to address with lawmakers and the media across the country.
In the last several months, in part due to the excesses of certain prominent companies, the whole idea of business meetings has become associated with boondoggle and waste. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Meetings Mean Business is a campaign working to protect the millions of American jobs that depend on business travel and events. Meetings Mean Business supports a robust travel industry that employs millions of hardworking Americans in hotels, restaurants and conference centers across the country.
Here are the hard numbers:
- Business travel accounts for $240 billion in spending and $39 billion in tax revenue at the federal, state, and local levels.
- The Dept. of Labor reported that nearly 200,000 travel-related jobs were lost in 2008 and expects another 247,000 to be lost in 2009.
- Each meeting and event traveler spends an average of $1,000 per trip.
- A new study shows that 87% of Americans who have attended an out-of-town meeting or convention for work say it is important to running a strong business.
But beneath these numbers, there is an even more compelling human story. According to the Meetings Mean Business website, “When business meetings and events are cancelled, it’s the hourly-wage workers – not corporate CEOs – who pay the highest price.” The site goes on to say, “Generating 1 million jobs and $27 billion in wages, meetings and events can provide a solution to our economic woes. Meetings and events support local communities and working families around the country – something we cannot afford to overlook as we rebuild our economy.”
As members of the travel community, we all need to become involved in this campaign to inform and reinforce the vital importance of business meetings. We at CCRA urge all our travel partners to take a moment and visit www.meetingsmeanbusiness.com to learn any of the many, simple yet powerful actions we, as individuals or as corporations, can take with our legislators and the media to restore the credibility of business meetings travel.
Jobs are at stake … we can make a difference! |
You are receiving this newsletter as a benefit of your participation in the CCRA Travel Solutions Hotel program or have requested to receive news from CCRA Travel Solutions independently through our website.
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