By using virtually any wireless device guests of IHG brand hotels can now book reservations, and get hotel directions.

InterContinental Hotels Group today unveiled enhanced wireless capabilities, offering its guests greater convenience and reservations access when planning their travel to any of IHG's 3,600 properties worldwide.

As the first hotel company to offer wireless reservation services in 2001, IHG continues to lead the industry in innovating its wireless reservations offerings to ensure that guests can more quickly and easily access the information they need about their hotel stay from any Web-enabled device. With this most recent expansion in services, IHG guests can:

• check availability at any InterContinental Hotels & Resort, Crowne Plaza, Hotel Indigo, Holiday Inn, Holiday Inn Express, Staybridge Suites and Candlewood Suites hotel; 
• book, view or cancel reservations; 
• access driving directions to a property; and 
• retrieve hotel and global reservations contact information.

This new functionality is currently available in English, but there are plans to expand this capability to IHG's eight other language sites (Arabic, Chinese, German, French, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish), so that no matter where IHG guests are in the world and no matter what their first language, they will be able access their reservations and get directions as long as they have wireless capability. Guests using their wireless device can go to mobile.ichotels.com to access IHG's enhanced Web application sites.

"As more guests use the Internet to plan their stays with us, we're constantly looking for ways to ensure that they can reach us any way they want to no matter where they are. In today's world, people are always on the go and we're excited to offer services to help make their travel planning easier," said Del Ross, vice president, Distribution Marketing, The Americas, IHG. "We continually look for ways to deliver positive experiences for our guests, even before they get to our doors, and we are doing that by building on our technology-based innovations."

IHG's re-engineered wireless application now supports all Web-enabled devices, including browser-based phones (with support for XHTML, CHTML, and WML 1.1 or 2.0), Pocket PC devices, Palm devices, Treo and Blackberry.

In 1995, IHG became the first hotel company to offer guests the ability to reserve rooms online; and in 2001, IHG became the first hotel company to provide guests with wireless reservation and hotel interaction capabilities. As a result of technology innovations, IHG Web sites worldwide have been used to place more than 20 million reservations totaling 41 million room nights, delivering more than $4.1billion in cumulative net revenue since 1995.

As of December 31, 2005, IHG reported that its Internet revenues increased from 13 percent to more than 14 percent of total rooms revenue, and the proportion of Internet revenues delivered through IHG's Web sites grew from 81 percent (2004) to 86 percent.