NEW YORK? In-room entertainment will get a taste of new technology in 2000 when CAIS Internet hooks up its new portal system to hotels using its high-speed Internet access. CAIS, which has signed deals with hotel giants Cendant Corp., Bass Hotels & Resorts and Hilton Hotels Corp., unveiled its new CAIS Portal at the International Hotel/Motel & Restaurant Show in New York last month. Its chainwide agreements give it the potential to wire up to 9,000 hotels thus far. The portal, which currently consists of 110 content providers, will provide information on business, financial, shopping, concierge and other services at broadband speeds that are said to be 175 times faster than 56K dial-up connections. The look of the portal pages can be customized for the look and feel of each hotel, said CAIS officials. ?As we roll out, hotel guests on the CAIS portals will have the ability to view video clips of movies from their rooms instead of just reading reviews,? said Randy Achee, vp/content and broadcast networks for CAIS. ?They will be getting information and ordering services from an interactive concierge. They will be shopping instantaneously in real-time, instead of waiting for orders to process, and they?ll be doing all of this over a single, standard copper wire line while talking on the phone at the same time,? he said. Gary Raban, executive vp of CAIS, said that use of the portal content by guests will mean additional revenue for the hotel. ?What is attractive is every time [someone uses the portal]the hotelier shares the revenue with us,? he said. Hotels can also go out to their local markets to get additional content providers, creating another source of revenue. Revenue sharing deals will be cut at the corporate level, according to CAIS. The portals will be available in kiosks that CAIS installs in hotels as well. Content providers include Yahoo Broadcast Services, eCal, Look Smart, e-tailers, ibaby.com, ebay, mapquest.com, news and weather outlets for up-to-the-minute information from CNET.com and Broadcast.com. Meanwhile, Darwin Networks, a competitor of CAIS? in the high-speed Internet arena, announced at the IH/M&RS that it has signed a $30 million supply agreement with Elastic Networks, which is a spin-off of Nortel Networks. Elastic will provide the hardware and connectivity software solutions that will let Darwin provide its high-speed broadband services to hotels. Darwin has signed agreements to hook up a potential 1,400 hotels, including Bass Hotels & Resorts, Allied Hospitality Group, Cavanaugh?s and Stormont Trice Corp. ?Rapid deployment is the focus of this agreement,? said Tom Gallo, vp/sales of Elastic Networks. With CAIS signing up so much of the market, the question is how much of the pie is left in terms of signing up hotel rooms for high-speed, in-room Internet access. Larry Pitterman, COO of Darwin, said that franchise flags don?t have total controls over the franchisees and that plenty of the pie is still left. ?There are a lot of hotels we can do business with,? he said. Pitterman said that Darwin has built portal pages for hotels in which it has installed high-speed Internet access and that it is looking at building a portal for mass customization. He is also looking at the potential of local portal pages, especially in the case of limited service hotels. ?If you are not a full service hotel, you have to be able to get food some place,? he said. ?Why not get it on-line??
