Web-Based System Supports Rapid Global Expansion at Sol Melia Hotel

Computer Associates International, Inc. (CA) today announced that Sol Melia, one of the world's leading hotel companies, has used CA's Advantage Gen for Enterprise Servers (Advantage Gen) to deploy a streamlined web-based marketing and sales system designed to speed the company's international expansion. The new system, which encompasses customer reservations, loyalty and tour operator contracts, has eased linkage with business partners' applications, provided a more intuitive graphical interface to agents and staff, and made it possible to extend access to users and customers via the Internet. As a result, sales have increased 200% in www.solmelia.com the first year alone.

Using Advantage Gen, Sol Melia developers integrated a wide range of existing applications into the new system. Those existing applications included both the company's core applications from SAP and Siebel and those of its business partners, such as Sabre, Amadeus, WorldSpan and Galileo.

"CA's Advantage Gen allowed us to develop a highly robust web-based system that fully leverages our existing systems and those of our partners," said Josep Buades, architecture manager, Sol Melia. "By shielding our developers from the underlying complexities of those systems, Advantage Gen enabled us to focus delivering functions with business value while reducing the time and cost to build the new system. This has resulted in a very important return in our investment in one year alone."

More than 500 Sol Melia employees use the new system to streamline their daily business tasks and effectively service the 23 million guests who visit the company's 350 hotels every year. The integration of multiple applications is enabling Sol Melia to collect data from multiple internal and external sources, support a sophisticated customer loyalty program serving 420,000 participants, and better manage its contracting relationships on a multi- national basis.

"Sol Melia's new suite of systems dramatically illustrate the tremendous positive impact information technology is having in the hospitality industry," said Leo Bensadon, country manager of CA Spain. "We are gratified that they selected Advantage Gen to support this critical IT initiative."