Las Vegas -- The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) has adopted Passkey as its event housing-management technology, bringing together the country's largest convention bureau with the leading provider of web-enabled software for group hotel reservations.
The LVCVA manages about 45,000 hotel reservations for groups annually, according to Nancy Murphy, the authority's vice president of sales.
That's a small percentage of total reservations attributed to groups in this the country's biggest destination for meetings, conventions, and trade shows. Last year, the Las Vegas area hosted 6.2 million convention and meeting delegates, representing 22,000 citywide events, according to the authority.
But more important than sheer numbers, the authority's adoption of Passkey aligns the LVCVA with major hotels in Las Vegas, according to Murphy. The hotels of MGM Mirage, which include the MGM Grand and Mandalay Bay, deploy Passkey as does Wynn Las Vegas, she said.
"Passkey offers a lot of advantages to the hotel community," said Murphy. "Our clients like it, and we felt the need to evolve with them, because we work with them in providing housing for citywide conventions."
Passkey automatically sends reservation information into hotels' property management and central reservations systems, thus saving hotels on the labor and potential errors involved in manually re-entering data from one system to the other. Planners can also manage their rooming lists through Passkey.
The authority handles attendee reservations for about eight to 10 groups at any one time, according to Murphy. The authority had previously deployed its own proprietary software, she said.
About 85 percent of major convention bureaus in North America that offer group housing management deploy Passkey, according to the Boston-based company.