Speaking at World Travel Market Africa in Cape Town this week, Eddie Scheun, managing director at Centricity, explained: “During our product development research we found that many of our customers in the hospitality and tourism sectors were struggling to effectively manage and distribute their digital assets such as photos, videos, and e-brochures to a geographically distributed and often impatient audience.
Many hotels use third-party products such as Dropbox, content distributors or their own websites, but none of these is a dedicated image library system and they do not always make the most out of presenting the images in an easy-to-navigate and searchable way, or else the hotel can’t control who has access to and is using their images. We wanted to make sure that we would eradicate the problems of creating and updating CDs, losing images or distributing outdated information.”
Once the images are in the Centricity cloud, they are automatically filed into a library of thumbnail and preview images that are organised and classified so that the entire library becomes easily searchable. Images can be shared by giving external users access to a hotel’s library with their own user credentials and security permissions, so that they can access only the images that the hotel allows, or the hotel can create a collection of images that they would like to share with others and instantly share their collection via email. Audit trails are visible, showing which images have been edited or downloaded and by which user.
