Cendyn and Arcaneo Partner to Create Next-Generation Meeting Venue Sourcing Solution for the Hospitality Industry

Boca Raton, Florida - June 19, 2009— Cendyn, a leading provider of interactive marketing solutions to the hospitality industry, and Arcaneo, developers of Metron™ the preferred strategic meetings management solution for Global 2000 Companies and Third-Party Service Providers, today announced their partnership to create a next-generation meeting venue sourcing solution for the hospitality industry.

The new offering from Cendyn and Arcaneo will enable all stakeholders from both the corporate and hotel sectors to more effectively manage venue sourcing. Users will now be able to visually research venues, issue RFPs, negotiate business terms, and manage the payment process in a visual, easy-to-use and integrated manner from within Metron™. Hotels will now have the ability to manage the RFP process from prospective corporate customers in a more efficient and standardized manner, thereby enabling them to improve service levels while gaining insights into customer purchasing behaviors. Arcaneo’s partnership with Cendyn enables the embedding of Cendyn’s new Visual Meeting Search Engine™ within Metron™, thereby offering the richest and most accurate capabilities for venue searching available to meeting planners anywhere. Additionally, Arcaneo is embedding Cendyn’s QuickQuote™ and eProposal™ products within Metron to provide immediate cost estimates and stunning proposal responses.

“In today’s business environment our customers are seeking increased cost savings, efficiencies and responsiveness from their internal and external meeting planning teams and suppliers. By extending Metron™ with Cendyn’s comprehensive and media rich venue search tool coupled to our best-in-class and transparent RFP workflow, we are addressing the needs of all stakeholders in the meetings industry.” said Dale Beckles, President & CEO of Arcaneo “Bringing the capabilities of Cendyn and Arcaneo’s products together to bridge the gap between the corporate and supplier worlds is a natural extension of our respective visions.”, added Beckles.

Cendyn’s award-winning eProposal™ system, used in hotels and venues worldwide, is the only proposal response system that is integrated with Metron™ which presents a distinct advantage for over 26,000 eProposal™ users. The quick and cost effective eProposal™ responses integrate with Metron™ in the eProposal™ format allowing the Meeting Planner to view a multimedia proposal along with standard content.

According to Charles Deyo, President of Cendyn “The end results will produce incremental business to hotels as well as other venues while making the meeting management process more efficient. This new initiative perfectly matches Cendyn’s mission to help our customers drive bottom line results.”

The goal of this partnership is to enhance all aspects of venue sourcing for both hotels and their corporate customers, while delivering the following benefits:

For Hotels

Better qualified leads
Effective differentiation
Increased customer satisfaction
Enhanced business intelligence
Reduced costs
For Corporations:

Richer venue selection
Quick and easy RFPs
Improved response times
Compliance tracking
360º visibility
Cendyn and Arcaneo invite attendees of the Hospitality Industry Technology Exposition & Conference (HITEC 2009), held June 22-25th, at the Anaheim Convention Center to their booth (#284) to join them in a first look at the next generation of venue sourcing.

About Arcaneo Metron™

Founded in 2001, Arcaneo is a provider of best-of-breed technology to all stakeholders in the meetings value chain. Arcaneo's flagship product, Metron™, is the recognized leader in strategic meetings management solutions for use by mid-size and Global 2000 enterprises seeking to more effectively plan, execute and measure meetings. With Metron™, meeting planners can better manage all aspects of meetings, while enabling management to measure the impact of meetings across their enterprise.

More information about Arcaneo is available at www.arcaneo.com.

People who know meetings know Metron.SM

About Cendyn

Cendyn is a full-service interactive marketing agency established in 1996. Cendyn has won several prestigious industry awards for its design, innovation and marketing efforts.

Specializing in turnkey solutions for the travel and hospitality industry, the innovative products are in use by more than 9,000 hotel and travel destinations worldwide. Cendyn provides highly personalized customer service and its comprehensive range of services include website marketing, website design, branding, search engine marketing, along with many other interactive products such as eProposal™, eConcierge™, eSurvey™, eInsight™, eContact™, eConnectivity™, eBooker™, and eMenus™ among others. For a complete list of products and services, please visit our website www.cendyn.com.

Let Cendyn show you how far an idea can go!

For more information about Cendyn, please contact Robin Deyo, Executive Vice President at rdeyo@cendyn.com or 561.314.3212.

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Arcaneo secures partnership with Crown

26 May 2009

Crown Business Communications has signed a unique partnership with Arcaneo, creators of Metron™, the world’s leading meetings and events management software solution.

Metron is a web-based enterprise meetings and events management solution designed for use by mid to large market organisations and third -party meeting management companies. It also provides the ability for managers and planners to analyse information in such areas as ROI, suppliers, budgets, attendee management, venue selection, housing, travel, human capital, and more.

Arcaneo’s offering is the most advanced and comprehensive meetings and events management solution in the market. It’s already in use with a variety of major corporate clients covering the Pharmaceutical, Financial Services, Professional Services, Consumer Goods and Healthcare sectors.

Crown will use Metron to offer super-efficient and cost-effective delegate management solutions to its clients. In addition, through Crown, clients will be able to pilot Metron’s wider offering in order to better plan, execute and measure meetings and events of all sizes and types, internal and external, face-to-face or virtual.

Crown MD, Nicky Havelaar, said: "by combining Crown’s deep understanding of meetings and event management with Metron’s advanced capabilities, clients can expect better run events, greater control and cost efficiencies of up to 20 per cent on their total corporate meeting spend. This is a unique partnership, enabling Crown to provide the most feature-rich and efficient meetings and event planning and management services in the UK."

"This partnership pairs Arcaneo’s leadership in meetings management technology with the renowned skill set and insight of Crown’s communication capabilities, to offer an industry-leading strategic meetings management solution." said Dale Beckles, CEO of Arcaneo. "Partnering with Crown is a natural evolution of our strategy to offer our customers more effective meeting experiences coupled with enhanced insights and controls."

Visa Introduces New Commercial Card to Help Manage Growing Corporate Meetings Expenditures

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--In response to growth in global spending on meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibitions, Visa Inc. (NYSE: V) today announced the addition of the Visa Meetings card to its suite of commercial payment solutions to help businesses more strategically manage this expense category.

According to research by the Aberdeen Group, surveyed companies spent on average nearly three percent of their annual revenues, or $17.3 million, on meetings-related expenses during 2007, up from $15.8 million the previous year.1 Aberdeen research also indicates that a meetings card ranks the highest among corporate expense managers as the most cost effective method for managing meetings and related expenses.2 Current growth in spending in this category is driving demand for effective expense management tools to help businesses control costs and manage their meetings spending, which is expected to reach $86 billion annually in the U.S. alone in 2008 according to research by PhoCusWright Inc.3

The Visa Meetings card includes the features of the existing Visa Purchasing and Visa Corporate payment cards. This combination offers a flexible procure-to-pay solution to help companies simplify the process to purchase, pay, reconcile and report on meetings-related expenditures. The new card provides corporate expense managers the ability to tailor a card program to meet their specific company needs while helping them to reduce costs, streamline operational and payment processes and make more informed business decisions.

“Using payment cards for meetings expenses helps enable companies to improve the efficiency of their spend management processes, gain greater control and visibility over their spending and ultimately drive increased cost savings to their bottom line,” said Darren Parslow, Global Head of Commercial Solutions, Visa Inc.

The Visa Meetings card builds upon a strategic alliance with ArcaneoTM, a leading global meetings technology provider, to integrate Visa Meetings card transaction data into Arcaneo’s MetronTM strategic meetings management system. This integration provides mid-size, large and multinational enterprises, along with meeting and travel management companies with the information they need to more efficiently manage meetings expenses.

“With an increasing focus among corporate CFOs on strategic meetings management, the Visa Meetings card in conjunction with MetronTM is intended to address a growing need among businesses for an end-to-end solution to more strategically manage their expenses” said Dale Beckles, President and CEO of Arcaneo.

The use of the Visa Meetings card with Arcaneo’s MetronTM system helps companies more easily centralize internal processes for purchasing, data tracking, reporting on meetings expenses and managing logistical aspects of planning meetings. This integration enables businesses to increase visibility into spending for meetings, travel, procurement and other expenses to enable greater compliance with corporate and regulatory policies and preferred supplier usage.

Web-based data and reporting tools available through Visa Information Management, an integral component of the Visa Meetings card, further improves company visibility into meetings spending. These tools provide access to transaction details and e-folio data from hotels, airlines, car rental agencies and other suppliers through easy-to-read reports, expense reporting tools, cardholder statements and file extract capabilities. These tools also enable consolidation of spending data from Visa commercial card programs across all departments, divisions and subsidiaries within a company to provide management with an aggregate view of all business expenses for travel, procurement and meetings.

Notes to Editors:

About Visa Inc.: Visa Inc. operates the world’s largest retail electronic payments network providing processing services and payment product platforms. This includes consumer credit, debit, prepaid and commercial payments, which are offered under the Visa, Visa Electron, Interlink and PLUS brands. Visa enjoys unsurpassed acceptance around the world and Visa/PLUS is one of the world’s largest global ATM networks, offering cash access in local currency in more than 170 countries. For more information, visit www.corporate.visa.com.

About Arcaneo: Founded in 2001, Arcaneo is a provider of best-of-breed technology to all stakeholders in the meetings value chain. Arcaneo's flagship product, MetronTM, is a strategic meetings management solution that is designed for use by mid-size and Global 2000 enterprises to more effectively plan, execute and measure meetings. With MetronTM, meeting planners can better manage all aspects of meetings, while enabling management to measure the impact of meetings across their enterprise www.arcaneo.com.

1 Strategic Meetings Management: Of MICE (Meetings, Incentives, Conferences & Exhibitions) and Spend, Aberdeen Group, February 2008

2 Strategic Meetings Management: Pick a Card, But Not Just Any Card, Aberdeen Group, February 2008

3 Groups and Meetings: Market Opportunity Redefined, PhoCusWright Inc, January 2007. Estimate includes corporate and association meetings spend.