Destination Relaunches Web SIte with RSS and New Enhancements

Destinationhotels.com Only Major Hospitality Management Company to Offer RSS on Proprietary Web Site

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. October 14, 2008

DENVER, CO, January 18, 2006. Destination Hotels & Resorts, the fifth largest independent hospitality management company in the United States, this week re-launched its proprietary Web site www.destinationhotels.com with a number of state-of-the-art enhancements including Really Simple Syndication (RSS) technology. Destination currently is the only hospitality management company offering this cutting edge technology on its Web site. "RSS allows our guests to receive up-to-date news, information and special offers," said Jennifer Long, director of Internet marketing for Destination. "It's different than receiving e-mail offers from our collection. With RSS guests can sign up for their own RSS feed, customized for their interests."

When a guest subscribes to an RSS feed, the headlines come through a personalized home page like My Yahoo! or My MSN or a selected RSS-reader. On destinationhotels.com guests can design their own customer feed selecting from 34 different properties or more than a dozen different experiences such as golf, ski, family, beach or spa vacations, to name a few. After selecting the particular experience or destination, guests will receive offers based on their selections as soon as the offers are added to the site. Guests can develop multiple feeds to satisfy various interests.

Destination added this new technology to meet the evolving needs of its technologically savvy guests. To enhance its site, the company partnered with Bethesda, Maryland-based E-Site Marketing to conduct an extensive usability study with focus groups, meeting planners, as well as concierge and reservations agents who have continual guest contact. Based on the feedback by all of these groups, E-Site Marketing recommended a number of enhancements to meet the varied needs and usage patterns of the traveling public.

"We discovered through our research that people search Web pages differently, so we designed a page that meets the varying search and discovery methods of today's busy travelers," said Felix Laboy, president and chief executive officer E-Site Marketing. For example, the site allows guests to explore an interactive "Journey Guide" outlining various locations. Guests also can explore by vacation type such as spa, ski, golf, and family if they are seeking a certain type of experience. The study also indicated that people prefer impactful photographs, so an enhanced photo gallery was added to the site with more property and room-type images found on every page.

Guests booking a Destination property through the Web also will find an enhanced booking engine with user-friendly enhancements that allow guests to immediately know if rooms are available at a property during a specific period of time. A calendar allows guests to see, at-a-glance if the property is sold out on any given night. If a property does not have rooms available, the system provides alternative suggestions for nearby Destination hotels that have availability. Guests booking through www.destinationhotels.com also are assured of the best available room rates that are available through public booking channels. The booking feature also has been upgraded to allow groups such as weddings, special events and meetings to have their booking code to reserve their negotiated rate.

All of the customer-friendly enhancements including RSS were added to the company's Mountain Collection, Meetings & Events and Golf Collection Web sites. The Mountain Collection site showcases properties found in world-class destinations such as Vail, Aspen, Jackson Hole, Telluride and Lake Tahoe and may be found at www.mountaindestination.com. The meeting site www.destinationmeetings.com provides meeting and social planners or brides-to-be with extensive information needed to book group and incentive programs at one of the collection's 34 hotels and resorts. The golf collection site showcases our golf courses throughout the country with the chance to learn more about the professionals at each course or study the yardage of the course.