Sheraton Denver Downtown Hotel Continues Hospitality Industry IT Innovation

DENVER, March 21, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- The Sheraton Denver Downtown Hotel's Information Technology team of Brandon Taugner and Benjamin Britton continue to develop and implement IT programs designed to make the hotel top-of-mind for national and international meeting planners. The most recent program is a state-of-the-art virtual hotel tour of Colorado's largest hotel.  

"Our hotel offers one of a very few virtual hotel tours within Starwood Hotels & Resorts North American division," states Taugner, Director of the IT Department. "Providing an exceptional virtual tour means that clients and meeting planners are able to tour the hotel from the convenience of an office, sometimes located thousands of miles away. The real estate business has done this for years and it's a huge benefit to our customers."

Taugner found that Santa Fe, N.M. based Voyager International was the most feature-full, innovative and affordable virtual tour provider for the hotel, and Denver based Zachary Cornwell came highly recommend as tour photographer.

The Sheraton's virtual tour offers 360 degree views of over 135,000 square feet of meeting space and guest rooms in a full screen, interactive, high definition format. The application gives clients the ability to navigate within a room or to adjacent rooms, as well as click on hotspots which provide useful information and/or links to external web content.

"We recently booked a significant meeting with the help of the virtual tour," states Maria Maxwell, the Sheraton Denver Downtown's Director of Sales & Marketing. "At the last minute, the client was unable to travel to Denver, yet needed to book a meeting. Our sales manager was able to virtually walk the client through the space and close the business." She continued that because the hotel has so much meeting space, the virtual tour is a benefit to the meeting planner who has already toured the hotel but wants to review meeting room capabilities.

The Sheraton known for continuing IR innovations and boasts is the largest Four Winds Interactive hospitality digital signage installation in the state of Colorado, as one of the largest Four Winds installations in the country.  These interactive signs, located in various areas of the hotel, communicate important information such as daily event listings, airport arrival and departure schedules, restaurant menus and hours, maps of the hotel and directions to various rooms.  The Sheraton's system manager, Ben Britton, is known as one of the most talented property level users of the Four Winds software and has single handedly developed interactive restaurant menus, an interactive meeting service paging system, graphic design enhancements, as well as power saving features. Britton is currently working on a mobile application to allow meeting attendees to view their meeting schedules on a mobile device, such as an iPhone or Android cell phone.

The Sheraton's IT team is also involved with Ecommerce and was the first to pilot and align GBCBlue ORION Online Room Service, Link@Sheraton cyber cafe and amenity portal with the corporate network while maintaining the highest levels of security and payment card industry compliance. The system allows guests the opportunity to place room service orders online and have the order posted automatically to their guest folio. Guests also have the option to purchase and schedule amenities for delivery and pay by credit card.

To virtually tour the Sheraton Denver Downtown Hotel, see www.sheratondenverdowntown.com and click under photos tab. The Sheraton Denver Downtown is located on the 16th Street Pedestrian Mall at 1550 Court Place.

Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Inc. is one of the leading hotel and leisure companies in the world with 1025 properties in 100 countries and territories with 145,000 employees at its owned and managed properties. Starwood Hotels is a fully integrated owner, operator and franchisor of hotels, resorts and residences with the following internationally renowned brands: St. Regis®, The Luxury Collection®, W®, Westin®, Le Meridien®, Sheraton®, Four Points® by Sheraton, and the recently launched Aloft®, and Element (SM).  Starwood Hotels also owns Starwood Vacation Ownership, Inc., one of the premier developers and operators of high quality vacation interval ownership resorts. For more information, please visit www.starwoodhotels.com.

SOURCE Sheraton Denver Downtown Hotel