The world's largest hotel chain

Key responsibilities

• To provide sales and marketing, reservations, accounts, purchasing and IT support services to 330 member hotels in the UK.
• To manage and support Best Western's European conference booking system

Best Western Hotels needed a low maintenance conference booking system that provided a booking tool, along with client, venue and management information for its conference coordinators, field sales, directors and hotel membership team.

The company's existing software application was unreliable and extremely high maintenance, frequently taking two-three days a week for administration and database synchronisation. In addition, its data output was poor and often inaccurate. It was also unable to provide performance statistics or data for marketing analysis, making it difficult for the company to predict future performance and business trends.

On the recommendation of industry colleagues, Solution 7 was invited to tender for the development of a bespoke conference booking system for the company.

After reviewing the specifications, Solution 7 believed and proposed that a web-based approach would provide greater flexibility to meet Best Western's future requirements. Whilst the proposal was initially rejected based on available budget, this was later reviewed and Solution 7 was awarded the contract.

Today, the Best Western booking system (Quest) provides central and remote booking and management reporting functionality for 50 internal users and directors. It also provides venue search and enquiry capabilities for more than 5,000 European clients.

Regarding future enhancements, the company is already in talks with Solution 7, and looks forward to many new developments including, extended client access for reporting, conference searches and booking confirmations, and a company-wide contact management system.