For four years I was whiling away in the London office, coordinating the prestigious North American tradeshow that is HITEC. Over 5,000km away, the RTConnect and RTSuite sales team along with management members swooned the delegates and built relationships with some of the biggest and brightest hotel tech companies. I waited in earnest to find out their experience, with often William Goldsberry getting overly excited by the opportunities.
2012 – and I am told I get to go. The prospect was daunting, Goldsberry and our CEO tried to reassure me that it is not the big bad beast I imagined. (I was having nightmares of conversations with CIO and CTOs about the best system integration techniques). Indeed they are right, HITEC is a friendly show and much smaller than that of WTM and ITB, but much more specific in its approach.
I met journalists from across all the North American publications; it was a pleasure to meet them in person after 5 years. And their enthusiasm to finally meet the face behind all the emails on product updates, customer wins and case studies, was inspiring. We talked distribution, channel mix, sales opportunities and how RateTiger will be in more places in 2013 than it has done in its 10-year history.
The rest of the team had a good show, in fact I never saw them for the number of meetings they had. The RTConnect team were talking about seamless connectivity, and channel integration as more companies look to direct connect, from CRS to PMS and plenty of channels.
We were pleased to be joined by Trust and Travel Tripper for our post – HITEC meal. We even had chance to head to Fells Point, on the edge of the Baltimore harbour. The old cobbled streets, red brick buildings and array of small restaurants, eateries, bars and pubs reminded me of a quaint town of England – home! We made sure we had some of their finest seafood delicacies including fish and mussels. But, Must go back for the Crab!
Ryan C Haynes is VP – Marketing Communications at eRevMax and is responsible for driving all PR and Marketing activities for RateTiger and eRevMax brands globally. Ryan is based out of London and can be reached at ryanh@ratetiger.com