LAS VEGAS—Radisson Hotels & Resorts is preparing for the “Fight of the Century” in 2002 by offering its properties 10 digital tools that will help drive hotel revenues and attract customers. During the brand’s general session, part of Carlson Hospitality Worldwide’s annual conference which concluded here last night, the company’s technology team— led by Scott Heintzeman, Chris Brosnahan, and Gino Giovannelli— offered a boxing-inspired presentation of all of Radisson’s electronic initiatives, proving the full-service brand is prepared to fight it’s competition head-on with technological advancements. The first word of advice to franchisees was to keep their online hotel information up-to-date with new pictures and hotel descriptions. According to Radisson’s research, 23% of Radisson’s customers feel the brand’s on-line information “could be better,” said Brasnahan. She added that research statistics show that 68% of travel customers search the Internet before making a buying decision, and in order to avoid losing potential customers, hotels need to use the Internet and stay fresh. Possible online tools for improving web performance include virtual tours with 360-degree pictures and streaming video, said executives. E-Learning is also a hot topic for the brand with Radisson’s on-line university now featuring seven different training programs and a new course being added each month. Heintzeman stressed the importance of participation from hotels in order to reduce employee turnover, which leads to broken customer relationships, re-training costs, and loss of know-how. Meanwhile, Giovannelli presented franchisees with results from the brand’s RIO Direct program in hopes of boosting participation in the online marketing tool. The program allows general managers to create customized hotel promotions for a specific group of guests, like Gold Point loyalty members. Giovannelli stated that one Radisson hotel that used the virtual tool last year to create a direct mail postcard campaign saw $155,000 in revenues result from a program that cost only $3,500. Carlson’s patent-pending MACH-1 handheld device was also highly promoted at the conference. Providing information on hotel sales, RevPAR, reservation statistics, and approximately 25 other indicators, MACH-1 offers franchisees an electronic research tool for monitoring their hotel performance. However, Heintzeman noted that the electronic information is not only limited to handheld devices, the MACH-1’s features are also available to franchisees through the company’s KnowledgeNet.com website. Executives also encouraged franchisees to use on-line measurement tools. Currently Radisson offers its hotels various electronic research tools, such as: the Hotelligence GDS reports, Phaser’s competitive set information, the GDS Rate Shopper, and Avalon reports, which analyzes hotels on-line presence. In addition, creating successful on-line packages could also help boost hotel revenues, said Giovannelli. He noted Radisson’s new “push out” packages, which tailor promotional information to meet the specific need of on-line users. Radisson.com promotions can now not only tell what users prefer by their on-line profiles, but the site can also determine what travel website the user has just come from— so if a customer had just searched hotels on a Florida travel site, Radisson.com would automatically display a Florida vacation package to the user on its homepage. But to get packages seen, sometimes hotels may need to put in a little extra effort, he said. He offered an example of a group of Florida hotels that recently purchased preferred search engine placement to ensure that Radisson.com would appear first when Internet shoppers searched keywords like “Florida hotels.” The group of Florida properties booked 279 guestrooms from the promotion during the month that it ran. “They saw $500,000 of incremental revenues from a program that cost only $70,000,” h