glh Hotels has won a prestigious World Travel Market London 2016 World Travel Leaders Award in recognition of the way it has developed highly personalised online hotel bookings.
The company’s former Customer, Markets and Strategy Director Alistair Campbell collected the award from Travolution Editor Lee Hayhurst today (7 November) at the WTM World Travel Leaders Award ceremony.
The Awards give WTM London’s Official Media Partners – which represent key travel industry media around the world – an excellent platform to congratulate and recognise those companies and individuals that have made significant and ground-breaking contributions to travel and tourism in their region or sector.
Three nominations from each of WTM London’s media partners were judged in September by a panel of three, consisting of an independent body, a representative of WTM London and the relevant media partner.
glh, the largest owner operator of hotels in London, has started the fightback among conventional hoteliers against powerful disruptors in the hospitality sector such as Airbnb.
It has launched a new concept in online hotel room sales and marketing, www.chooseyourownroom.com, and implemented a hotel operations concept likely to be copied by many.
‘Radical Hosting’ is effectively personalisation for the hotel sector, combining artificial and human intelligence to give the customer a high level of customer service. This will see hotels develop much more useful in-property and web-based concierge services, personalised room features, and extend the range of add-on services.
The judges at the WTM World Travel Leaders Award said: “This is a clever idea but also an obvious one with hotels finally catching up with airlines and train bookings.
“This innovation will change the way consumers interact with hotels.”
Every year, World Travel Leaders Awards are presented at WTM London. The full list of 2016 winners is:
Canada: Destination Canada
Italy: Grimaldi Lines
India: SpiceJet Airlines
Spain: LogiTravel
Brazil: Serra Verdo Express
Portugal: The Azores Tourism Board
China: UTour Group Co. Ltd
Travel Weekly US: Yigit Yigiter (Timelooper)
Travolution: glh Hotels
Middle East: Dubai Parks & Resorts
TTG: Holiday Extras
WTM London is the event where the travel and tourism industry conducts its business deals. Buyers from the WTM Buyers’ Club have a combined purchasing responsibility of $22.6 billion (£15.8bn) and sign deals at the event worth $3.6 billion (£2.5bn).
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World Travel Market London
WTM London, the leading global event for the travel industry, is the must-attend three-day business-to-business exhibition for the worldwide travel and tourism industry.
Almost 50,000 senior travel industry professionals, government ministers and international press, embark on ExCeL – London every November to network, negotiate and discover the latest industry opinion and trends at WTM London.
WTM London is the event where the travel industry conducts and concludes its deals. WTM London will generate around £2.5 billion of travel industry contracts.
WTM London is part of Reed Travel Exhibition’s World Travel Market events, which also includes Arabian Travel Market, World Travel Market Latin America and World Travel Market Africa. www.wtmworld.com
Reed Travel Exhibitions
Reed Travel Exhibitions (RTE) is the world’s leading provider of exhibitions in the travel and tourism industry. Its wide-ranging portfolio of events around the globe covers leisure travel, luxury travel, meetings, incentives and business travel, as well as golf, ski and spa travel.
RTE, which organises more than 22 events around the world, includes three divisions; World Travel Market, IBTM Events and International Luxury Travel Market.
RTE is a business unit of Reed Exhibitions.
About Reed Exhibitions
Reed Exhibitions is the world’s leading events organiser, with more than 500 events in 43 countries. In 2014 Reed brought together more than seven million event participants from around the world generating billions of dollars in business. Today Reed events are held throughout the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Asia Pacific and Africa and organised by 41 fully staffed offices. Reed Exhibitions serves 43 industry sectors with trade and consumer events. It is part of the RELX Group plc, a world-leading provider of information solutions for professional customers across industries.