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It was purchased about a month back from the consortium of airlines that had founded it. Cendant is a giant "nothin' but brands" company that specializes in franchise operations--they own Budget, Avis, a bunch of hotel brands, Century 21 (the real estate brokerage), etc., etc. They also have a travel division that owns Orbitz, CheapTickets.com, and so on.

Plus they're a major player in the timeshare business. They own RCI (the biggest timeshare management and swapping enterprise; the other one is Interval International).

For what it's worth.

Huh?

Philip Morris has been held in a holding company since 1985. PM is still a company.

All they did was changed the name of their holding company, which owns things much larger then just the PM tobacco company.

TV ads from Avis rental car ads, Century 21, or Howard Johnson do not say Cendant at the end, do they? Do you find this deceptive as well?

The European satellite navigation project Galileo is at http://europa.eu.int/comm/dgs/energy_transport/gal ileo/index_en.htm.

That's what India and China are getting involved with. Airlines, not nations, get involved with Galileo.com.

also look at Hotel Software Systems Ltd., who makes a hospitality/reservations package used by Cendant, a $4 billion dollar hotel franchiser.

An article about 'em is here.

There is no "Days Inn" system. Cendant properties choose between "Project Powerup" systems from three PMS vendors: HSS, Multi-Systems, or REZSolutions. These are three completely different PMS apps with Cendant interface modules. Two of these run on UNIX-type OSs, the latter runs on NT. Unfortunately, the hospitality industry is about two decades behind in software development, the *nix offerings all have abysmal user interfaces. With the average moronic front desk staffer in mind the GM is drooling over a Win GUI interface in hopes that his staff, who types one word per hour, might someday take less than a decade to check in a guest. The choice between the three systems (at least for Cendant brands) is indeed made at the property level and not higher.

As for your statement that most franchises write their own front-office, this is just wrong. There is only one chain that writes their own, I think it is Hilton. Most franchises don't care what package (if any) the individual properties use, that was the big whoop-de-do with Cendant's Project Powerup: unified software. Although I don't know exactly how unified equates to three different packages in their case.

The ire over Project Powerup had nothing to do with technical issues. Nobody wanted to install the system because it interfaced directly with Cendant. Hotels pay franchise fees based upon room revenues, with a direct connection to Cendant it would no longer be possible to fiddle with the figures in order to pay less franchise fees. There was also the fact that Cendant would be using your guest database for marketing. Big Brother at its finest! Oh yeah, and Cendant only footed the bill for a minimal installation. For my previous employer, they offered to replace our 15 terminals and custom software with 2 terminals. This, of course, would have made our Howard Johnsons front desk disparate from our other two hotels on the same property that were not Cendant brands, as well as leaving it unable to communicate with our accounting, inventory control, and 75 point of sale terminals at the 14 bars and restaurants located on the property (all running custom in-house software). The switch would've costed our company at least $100K annually in additional staff required to manually do accounting processes that were automated under the existing system. To this day, no Project Powerup system was ever brought to that property.

The hospitality industry's sister, the service industry, is dominated by unix. Micros is the major player there, and their unix offering is rock solid and can support 250+ terminals (cash registers) on one server. Their NT offering can't do above 25. Unix doesn't show its ass there like it does in the hospitality industry because the cash registers are all custom hardware with their own IO that only communicate with the server to send transaction information (over serial cables!). So the wait staff don't have to type ./burger.pl, they just press the picture.

maru
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