TORONTO, ON - May 5, 2010 – Sheraton Centre Toronto has unveiled its Cisco TelePresenceTM meeting suite today with a virtual, interactive meeting spanning across two continents. The Sheraton Centre Toronto joins the W Chicago City Center and Sheraton on the Park Sydney as the first in Starwood's global portfolio to introduce the new meeting facilities, showcasing the state-of-the-art Cisco TelePresence technology.
Other Starwood locations planned to open throughout 2010 include The Westin Los Angeles Airport, with the anticipation to expand the offering to key domestic and international business markets such as Dallas, San Francisco, Brussels, Paris, Hong Kong and Frankfurt. As an industry first, reservations for these telepresence rooms can be made instantly using the Tata Communications online portal, with a convenient payment capability using all major credit cards.
As the world and the hotel industry grow increasingly more global, Starwood is continuing their legacy of innovation and looking at tomorrow's travellers and how they want to meet. There is also an increasing demand to incorporate technology, virtual meetings and social media into new meeting offerings from the next generation of business travelers.
"The launch of the new Cisco TelePresence meeting suite at the Sheraton Centre Toronto is a sign of our commitment to innovation by offering our clients an exciting, new meetings solution that facilitates a 'face-to-face' meeting in the same room regardless of global location," said Tony Dunn, general manager, Sheraton Centre Toronto. "We are thrilled to have partnered with Tata Communications on this new technology and look forward to offering this new meetings solution to our guests."
"We are delighted to continue our public Telepresence room rollout with Starwood and our first facility in Canada," said John Landau, Senior Vice President, Tata Communications. "As the 14th room on our global network of public Telepresence locations within our community of partners, the Toronto room is a key addition in our effort to meet the demand of enterprises to collaborate effectively across geographies. We look forward to our continuing partnership with Starwood to extend this network to the major business centres globally."
"Sheraton Centre's Cisco TelePresence meeting suite offers businesses the ability to quickly pull together global teams for live, face-to-face meetings," said Jeff Seifert, chief technology officer for Cisco Canada. "Business can access Cisco TelePresence around the clock to accommodate any time zone, without the worry of travel bookings or airport delays."
Cisco TelePresence provides life-like, high definition, conferencing facilities with superior audio, video and environmental qualities allowing participants to meet their colleagues, customers and business partners across a virtual table. The public facility offers users who do not have telepresence rooms within their company, access to this cutting-edge technology at an affordable per hour rental rate. Tata Communications has several operational public rooms in India (Mumbai, Bangalore (x2), Chennai, Hyderabad, Delhi and Gurgaon), UK (London) and USA (Boston), Manila with PLDT in the Philippines and Johannesburg with Neotel in South Africa.
For more information about Starwood Hotels Cisco TelePresence Suites visit http://www.tatacommunications.com/telepresence/.
About Starwood Hotels
Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Inc. is one of the leading hotel and leisure companies in the world with 1000 properties in nearly 100 countries and territories with 145,000 employees at its owned and managed properties. Starwood Hotels is a fully integrated owner, operator and franchisor of hotels, resorts and residences with the following internationally renowned brands: St. Regis®, The Luxury Collection®, W®, Westin®, Le Méridien®, Sheraton®, Four Points® by Sheraton, and the recently launched Aloft®, and Element SM. Starwood Hotels also owns Starwood Vacation Ownership, Inc., one of the premier developers and operators of high quality vacation interval ownership resorts. For more information, please visit www.starwoodhotels.com.
