Vis Rez Winners of the Dublin City Enterprise Denis Colleran Award 2008

Congratulation to Vis Rez, winners of the Dublin City Enterprise Denis Colleran Award for 2009. Visrez was set up in 2006 by Nicky & Dominic Morrogh and is owned 50-50.

The company supplies internet reservation systems and online marketing services to the tourism and hospitality sector. Their commission-free, real-time reservation systems generate millions in annual sales for their clients and their online marketing services ensure clients remain at the forefront of internet distribution.

Products & Services

Their  ‘Rooms & Events’ booking engine is a commission-free reservation system used by hotels, tourism, leisure and entertainment venues. This system can be integrated directly with Micros Fidelio (the hospitality industry’s leading front of house system or used as a Standalone booking system. Their online marketing services include web development, email marketing, search engine optimization and pay per click campaign management. They provide internet services to over two hundred clients in Ireland and a number abroad.

Markets Served Client Base

Tourism, Hospitality, Leisure and Entertainment Sectors currently focusing on the domestic market although they receive numerous enquiries from around the world.

Number of employees

Seven full time employees and up to eight contractor staff

Background/ Qualifications / Experience/ Motivation in their own words;

"We often hear comments from clients and colleagues  about how different we are and this is very true. Dominic is a qualified electronic engineer who worked his way up the ranks in the IT sector before returning to UCC for a masters in computer science. I went straight into business after moving to Dublin, starting in Webmedia with two partners and eventually taking on the company on my own. Our approach to everything is very different, Each of our strengths are the others weakness.  We have taken very different paths to get to where we are today but our combined experience and personalities have helped us overcome may situations. Our motivation to create a business comes from our family background which owned a business for 100 years until in 2001 due to fraud.  This was a very public event which devastated our family and although we don’t discuss it much, it is a major motivational factor".

Major Achievements:

Two events come to mind.

"The first was how we got started together. In November 2004, I called Dom who was on holidays in the states to ask if he’d come home immediately to help me at a meeting. I told him it would be worth his while but he’d have to pay for his own flight. The meeting was with Irish Distillers, who were about to award a contract to another company to upgrade the reservations system in Jameson & Midleton Distilleries. I convinced them we could provide a web-based alternative. They agreed to a meeting but told us the contract was as good as gone.  He arrived back the day before and we worked through the night. We won the contract the following morning and this project gave us our start. 

While working on this job, we researched for other opportunities within the tourism and hospitality. At the time I was providing online marketing services to hotels and could see that many hotels did not offer a real-time reservation mechanism on their own websites. This meant that bookings made on a hotels own site did not go directly into their front of house system. Hotels were also charged commission on each booking on their own sites and an extensive amount of data entry was required to transfer bookings from one system to another, leading to overbooking, error and other problems.
We approached Micros Fidelio, the hospitality industry’s leading IT supplier with a proposal to develop a system to connect reservations on a hotels site with their Front of house software; Fidelio the world’s leading hotel system, installed in over 20,000 hotels worldwide. Our proposed site was Ireland’s largest hotel, Citywest and possibly due to its scale interested Micros. We worked alongside Micros for over a year, developing a partnership which other companies had tried to establish before us. We became the first company to deliver a solution which today forms an integral part of a hotel’s online strategy. Our Real-Time reservation system was the first of its’ kind for an Irish Hotel and only the 11th worldwide. The previous ones had been done by the large hotel chains.  This system delivered a 100%  increase in online revenue in just four months for Citywest. In addition the client could now take upfront payments on each transaction, improving cashflow and retain the best rates for own site. 

As a result we were able to position Visrez as a cutting edge systems supplier without any advertising. Our systems now handle over millions in annual sales and we are 100% responsible for the ongoing management and maintenance.  These are the two events of most importance to date, we hope there will be many more.
Plans for the future 

Our number one aim is to build a services business that can compete on a global level within the tourism, and hospitality industry.  Successful companies are not built around single products or services and we are constantly trying to develop new products and enhance our services. We plan to launch a range of fixed fee system which will be sold online to small and medium sized companies around the world. We also plan to offer for free versions of these systems to small businesses in the developing world."

Company Website: http://www.visrez.com/

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