Starwood Mobilizes Hotel Experience With BlackBerry App

One of the world’s leading hotel companies, Starwood’s global franchise includes more than 1,000 hotels in 100 countries. In the highly competitive hospitality industry, loyalty programs such as Starwood Preferred Guest (SPG) are vital for providing personalized customer service and influencing buying behavior.

CSC and Starwood Hotels & Resorts recently developed the SPG app so members with a BlackBerry smartphone can book hotels and keep track of their accounts while on the go.The SPG BlackBerry app will fit nicely into Starwood’s marketing strategy to have a presence on all the leading mobile platforms and social media networks.

Transforming the hotel experience

With the BlackBerry app, SPG members are able to locate hotels, get directions, make reservations and access real-time updates on their account activities.

“We’ve been very focused on the mobile space,” says Chris Holdren, Starwood’s senior vice president of SPG. “I think it has the ability to transform the hotel experience for our members when they travel and stay with us.” SPG members are also able to use the BlackBerry app to keep track of their Starpoints balances, view details of their upcoming stays and check their itineraries.

Deep development expertise

CSC develops mobile applications for all platforms. Our BlackBerry development experience includes enterprise products that are used by companies internally as well as customer-facing apps for financial services clients such as insurance carriers.

Holdren notes, “What CSC brings to the table is deep knowledge of the BlackBerry platform and all its capabilities to help us achieve our vision for this application on that platform. We didn’t have that in-house, so it was a critical need for us to be able to create this application.”

Mobile apps in demand

Ken Powell, a partner in CSC’s systems integration and development practice, says we are getting more and more requests for mobile application development, and many additional projects are in the works. With the BlackBerry app from SPG, much of CSC’s work was to re-engineer Starwood’s existing iPhone app.

Building on this, Powell says it is essential for CSC to help companies fine-tune their overall mobile application strategies: “Our ultimate goal is to develop a mobile application that is cross-platform supportable. You don’t want to have to reinvent the wheel every time.”

For More Information

Download the entire CSC World Starwood article (PDF, 153KB).

Read our mobility articles Defining Your Mobile Strategy: A Guide to Developing Apps (PDF, 211KB) and iPad for the Enterprise: Is the Time Right? (PDF, 225KB)

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