Gaylord Picks’ i5/OS System for National Harbor Convention Center

September 25, 2007 Alex Woodie

The Gaylord Entertainment Company will stay with what it knows in outfitting its newest convention center with IT capabilities. Last week, Agilysys announced that Gaylord will use a suite of software anchored by its i5/OS-based Lodging Management System (LMS) to run its new 40-acre Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center, which is scheduled to open in the new community of National Harbor, Maryland, next April.

Gaylord is a big System i customer, as it uses LMS and other Agilysys products to manage its other properties. These include the 2,800-room Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center in Nashville, Tennessee (site of the 2008 COMMON conference starting March 30, as well as the Spring 2002 conference), the 1,400-room Gaylord Palms Resort & Convention Center in Kissimmee, Florida (site of the Fall 2003 COMMON conference), and the 1,500-room Gaylord Texan Resort & Convention Center in Grapevine, Texas, which has also hosted System i-related events. (Gaylord is currently planning to build a fifth convention center in Chula Vista, California, but that project has run into trouble with local unions.)

Not surprisingly, Gaylord decided to adopt a similar IT setup with its new National Harbor convention center. With a proficiency already built around LMS and the System i platform, it made a lot of sense for Gaylord to stick with what it knows works.

Bruce Davis, director of information technology for the new National Harbor property, says a level of trust has grown between Gaylord and Agilysys over the years. “LMS automates every aspect of hotel operations with systems that greatly enhance the guest experience,” Davis says. “It also allows the incorporation of additional vendor-supplied modules for improved efficiency and provides seamless connectivity between the hotel and outside vendors.”

LMS and its modules will handle nearly every aspect of managing the new National Harbor convention center, from online reservations to settlement at check-out. Surrounding the solutions will be LMS ResNet, a Web-based real-time reservation system that will allow people to book room reservations directly into the LMS property management system over the Web; LMS Guest eMarketing (GeM), a guest correspondence and marketing management solution that will allow Gaylord to conduct surveys and e-mail marketing campaigns; the InfoGenesis point of sale (POS) system running on a touch-screen Windows Terminal Application (WTA); and the DataMagine document management solution, which scans, indexes, and retrieves documents and computer reports to help streamline recordkeeping and archive data.

LMS, which Agilysys obtained with its acquisition of Inter-American Data (IAD) in 2003 (when Agilysys went by the name Pioneer-Standard), is used by some of the biggest casino resorts in Las Vegas and Atlantic City, and will be heavily relied upon at the new Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center. The $800 million property will include about 2,000 guest rooms, seven restaurants and eateries, retail shops, a private marina, a 20,000-square-foot spa and fitness center, and 470,000 square feet of exhibition and meeting space. It’s already one of the largest hotels on the East Coast, and when it opens next spring, it will be at the center a new $4 billion development, called National Harbor, located on the Potomac River just minutes from Washington D.C.