Best Western plans major roll-out of 360-degree virtual tours

In its endeavour to facilitate customer's online booking process through
virtual tours on its website, Best Western International has started
working on a plan to roll-out 360-degree virtual tours for each of its
2400 North American properties.

David Kong, president and chief executive officer, Best Western
International said that the company's research indicates that detailed
visuals, depicting the specific features and amenities that define a
property, play a key role in the booking process.

"With nearly half of our bookings originating online, it's critical that
we provide consumers with the information and images they need and want
to make decisions," said Kong.

The company stated that consumers booking at www.bestwestern.com will be
able to view five distinct virtual tours for every Best Western hotel in
the U.S., Canada and the Caribbean, with each property featuring a
360-degree display of the hotel's exterior, a standard guest room, and a
deluxe room/suite, in addition to two other areas representative of the
property, such as a pool, meeting room or restaurant. The initiative is
being planned for the 2006 summer travel season.

The company referred to research by Yesawich, Pepperdine, Brown &
Russell and Yankelovich Partners, as which indicates that 57 percent of
leisure travelers and 46 percent of business travelers called virtual
tours on a hotel Web site "a very desirable feature." Further, according
to research by DoubleClick, rich media or virtual tours generate 46
percent more sales (bookings) than still images.

Providing an insight, the company says the project, which will involve a
team of nearly 75, is expected to take 24,000-plus hours to complete.
Production crews will travel more than 350,000 miles gathering in excess
of 12,000 virtual tour images.

Further, it stated that in addition to the 360-degree virtual tours,
Best Western will add eight new still shots per property to its Web site
-- a combination of interior and exterior photographs. Other
enhancements made to bestwestern.com this year include the addition of
translated content into French, German, Italian, Spanish, Chinese,
Japanese and Korean languages.

"The move to virtual tours also provides the hotel chain with another
means by which to capitalize on the growth in online reservations. In
the last year, bookings on the company's Web site alone have risen
nearly 48 percent. On average, the site has been booking $1 million in
revenue per day for Best Western since January 2005," said the company.

"We expect the virtual tour feature to provide us with a distinct
advantage in the mid-scale market and  to propel the growth of our
online revenue even further," said Kong.