Riviera goes live with LANSA for the Web
Celebrating more than 40 years as The Entertainment Center of Las Vegas, the Riviera Hotel & Casino continues its star-studded heritage as Las Vegas' hottest spot for fine dining, entertainment and gaming excitement. Now, using ResNet, an AS/400 eBusiness application, customers can check hotel room availability, place reservations, charge it to a credit card and receive a confirmation number in real-time over the Web.
ResNet was built with LANSA for the Web, is an extension to Lodging Management System (LMS), an AS/400 based property management package for hotels, casinos and resorts. Riviera now runs its entire Web site on an AS/400 Web server.
Bob Vannucci, Vice President of Marketing & Entertainment, explains: "The Riviera is using new IBM® 'cutting edge' AS/400® technology, to create an improved Internet Web page with quicker response time and an On-Line 'Real-time' Room Reservation System. As we strive to find 'New Ways of Doing Business', we will be consistently upgrading our site."
Whether you want to book a room, get married in the Wedding Chapel, change your hair style, buy a Red Skelton original oil, plan a convention, plunge into a pool, shop for fancy clothing, play tennis or join the Slot Club, the Riviera Web site puts all the necessary information at your fingertips.
Robin Neale, Director of Information System, states, "We are pleased with the AS/400 as a Web server and have decided to run the entire Riviera Web site, both transactions and brochure style information, from that platform."
"In a few years time we predict most of our reservations will be made electronically"
Online Hotel Reservations
Criss Chrestman, Director of Strategic Technology at Agilysys, explains how LANSA for the Web made it easy to build ResNet. "It is very important that a Web-based reservation system has real-time access to data. Believe it or not, an Internet reservation that is not on-line can cost the hotel money and inconvenience the customer by not "being in sync" with the inventory availability, rating strategy, credit authorization, and customer information needed to make a valid reservation. The ability to work directly and securely with production data was one of the reasons we choose LANSA for the Web."
"Our LANSA for the Web extension to the LMS system allows our customers to promote and take bookings directly on their Web site, fully integrated with their existing AS/400 management systems, without employing the additional staff or additional outside expertise that would be needed if Internet reservations were implemented on a separate Web server."
"We are experts in the hospitality industry and don't want to become Internet experts. We like to focus on the application, data integrity and give a competitive edge to our customers with our software. With LANSA for the Web we didn't need to become Internet specialists to get our Internet reservation system working."
Criss concludes, "We had the initial application Web enabled the first day we had LANSA for the Web. There was little learning curve at all for our developers who had worked with LANSA before. With no previous Internet skills, it took us less than one week to learn to generate the applications with visual components and with the look we wanted. And it takes our average RPG developer only about two weeks to get productive with LANSA."
Company and System Information
The Riviera Hotel and Casino
- Web site: www.rivierahotel.com
- The Riviera Hotel and Casino has 4 towers with 2,100 guestrooms, including 158 suites. It offers over 100,000 square feet of casino space, with all forms of reel slots and video games, table games, poker, keno and more.
- Over 1½ million people visit the Riviera each year.
- The Riviera employs 2100 staff.
ResNet system Information
- The Riviera uses a two-tiered approach. The Web pages are being served from an AS/400 S-10 purchased as a Web Server that sends requests back to the production AS/400 310-2044 where the LMS application and room reservation data reside. Later this year the model 310 (a CISC machine) will be upgraded to a faster RISC model.
- The Riviera uses I/NET's CommerceServer/400 with Secure Socket Layers and AS/400 Firewall technology for security.
- Agilysys, Inc. acquired Inter-American Data, Inc. in 2004.
- Agilysys is one of the foremost distributors and premier resellers of enterprise computer technology solutions. It has a proven track record of delivering complex server and storage hardware, software and services to resellers, large and medium-sized corporate customers and public-sector clients across a diverse set of industries. In addition, the company provides customer-centric software applications and services focused on the retail and hospitality markets. Agilysys is a lodging hospitality software specialist (Agilysys trainers are former hotel professionals) and uniquely qualified to train and support hotel staff.
- For more information about Agilsys, Inc, ResNet and LMS visit: www.agilysys.com