NEW YORK— Following almost two years of development, Canada-based Fairmont Hotels & Resorts today launched a three-prong e-business strategy. The new plan will tie together its properties, customers and employees in an effort to synergize relationships and leverage brand awareness while the company pursues greater growth. Speaking at The Plaza, Fairmont’s flagship hotel here, President/COO Chris Cahill said the 37-property company is charting its growth strategies and will wrap technology, in the form of three separate portals, around the initiatives. “The first thing is to energize the brand,” said Cahill noting up until 1999, there were only seven hotels in the brand. “The good news is we’re only in 10 of the top 25 markets in the United States, so our opportunities to grow are quite good. But from a brand and brand-building exercise, we’re coming to this game rather late. We’ve put a lot of thought around how we can use technology to help grow the brand and penetrate our target audience.” A second key strategy is to maximize the performance of existing assets, which represent some 21,000 rooms. “A lot of that relates to efficiency and operational activity,” said Cahill, “And, again, we’re using technology as much as possible in that regard.” The third initiative is to globalize and expand. Cahill noted Fairmont will add a 38th property— and sixth country— with the opening in February of a hotel in Dubai. The technology end-to-end solution, secured by a Cicso Systems backbone, establishes a trio of websites: an enhanced broadbased www.fairmont.com and a guestroom portal, www.the fairmont.net, both consumer-focused. A third, www.myfairmont.com, will be closer to an intranet system and dedicated to Fairmont’s 19,000 employees as a boost to service excellence via increased customer preference knowledge. All three are linked through a data warehouse and content database, which feed into a guest personalization engine. “We’ve spent the last six months rolling it out to our system, it literally finished two weeks ago,” said Tom Storey, Fairmont’s evp/business development. “We’ve had a 300% increase in bookings versus October 2000,” with 75%-80% of the properties up online. The main Fairmont site allows guests to select from experiences — mountains, beaches, etc. as a starting off point, honed by a virtual concierge that solicits areas of interest to them, then profiles and ranks the properties relative to those interests. Other search engines seek out locations or utilize key words to search the entire site to deliver on those key words. In addition to expanded booking capabilities (guests now receive a confirmation number, which they can use to alter reservations), guests may now also book activities and services, such as restaurant, spa or tee time reservations. Fairmont is looking to expand that to include destination activities. There have been 1,500 such bookings thus far, said Storey. Members of Fairmont’s loyalty program, President’s Club, can come into their own section on the site and build their own profiles as to what services they want. Each property builds its own content which is wrangled by trained staff charged with updating the hotel site. With the launch of the e-business strategy, Fairmont now has an infrastucture in place that allows it to tailor the hotel experience for the guest down to the hotel level, “and ideally” down to the employee level, at each and every hotel. “It’s through this linking that we’re able to gain information about our customers that will allow us to better personalize the guest experience,” said Storey. To further that, Fairmont has entered into a partnership with 10Best, which categorizes the top 10 attractions proximate to a hotel in a specific area. An additional capability—Staff Picker—will be launched by week’s end to highlight individual property concierge selections, helping connect staff with guest. The company has been pursuing a feasible—and viable— e-business st