Sol Melia Chooses Lanyon's RFPpublisher(TM) and RatePublisher(TM) For Automated RFP and Rate Management

Lanyon Welcomes Sol Melia Into Its Automated Solution Family Joining Over 60 Other Brands

Press Release: Lanyon
July 17, 2002
DALLAS, TX -- Lanyon (www.lanyon.com ) announced yesterday Sol Melia signed a multi-year agreement for RFPpublisher and RatePublisher. The efficiency tools are part of Lanyon's PropertyVault suite, the industry standard for content management and publishing.

Ron Roy, Vice President of Sales for Sol Melia, explained, "We have over 350 terrific and diverse properties in over 30 countries, and we're growing. Since we did not have a central repository of property information, we used many vehicles just to get the information to and from our properties, including mail, phone calls, e-mail, faxes, and many other slow and costly manual processes to meet our bid deadlines. It's a tremendous challenge to collect and process accurate information from all our properties simultaneously. We really needed a solution to deliver our best product presentation to our consortia and corporate partners. We chose RFPpublisher because it helps us to deliver high quality bids on time to our partners. That translates into more business for our properties."

"RFPpublisher and PropertyVault(TM) were designed to address our customers' business practices and requirements," said Mario E. Sagastume, Lanyon's Chief Relationship Officer. "With such a rich and diverse property portfolio, Sol Melia needs a sales tool that is simpler, more effective, and that gives them more control over the entire RFP process. With an agile web- based system, Ron and his team can manage the progress of each RFP, monitoring the property content and rates at any time. The overall process is faster, the data quality improves, and Sol Melia are able to bid more business. Ron and his team now can deliver the information their agency and corporate partners need, when they need it, and in formats that they can easily use."

Sol Melia also will use Lanyon's RatePublisher. "We needed a solution to replace the costly and slow manual effort of entering rates into four separate systems and our own CRS," said David Orensanz, Director of Reservation Systems. "Lanyon's RatePublisher can automatically load rates from our CRS into each of the GDS."

"RatePublisher is an industry standard," said Sagastume. "It's an automation tool that performs live updates on all rates and optional qualifiers such as commission in the GDS. And, when the negotiated rate- loading season starts, RatePublisher has the bandwidth to publish a large number of rates in a very short period of time, enabling the Sol Melia to be ready to sell those rates when the contract period begins."

About Sol Melia

Sol Melia is the leading hotel company in Spain, Latin America and the Caribbean, the third largest hotel company in Europe and number ten in the world ranking. The company provides more than 350 hotels in 30 countries under its Melia Hotels, TRYP Hotels, Sol Hotels and Paradisus Resorts brands.

About Lanyon

For 18 years, Lanyon has focused on delivering exceptional marketing distribution technologies to the travel industry. Today, Lanyon is the recognized leader in Content Management, Channel Management, and Process Improvement. From its early success with GDS publishing and productivity tools to its latest Internet applications, Lanyon products are found in travel-related companies that effectively market their services electronically.

Lanyon is headquartered in Dallas, Texas. Sales, support, and development centers are located in Houston and Chicago.

For more information, visit Lanyon's website: www.lanyon.com .

SOURCE: Lanyon