Vertical Booking USA CEO/President Mark Lewis-Brown is featured on the Lodging Leaders Podcast
Mark Lewis-Brown is a hospitality industry veteran with 25 years of experience in online distribution, hotel operations and airline sales. He’s recognized as a visionary for product development, client services and marketing efforts at Vertical Booking, Centric Hospitality Group and Genares.
Mark founded InnPoints in 1995, giving independent and boutique properties the chance to establish a loyal client base and compete with the major hotel chains through a frequent stay program. One year later, the company merged with Bed&Breakfast Direct to form InnPoints Worldwide, an electronic reservation distribution and marketing company. After fifteen successful years of developing reservation technology and services including Qube Hotels and StayCredits, Mark played a key role in the creation of Centric Hospitality Group, designing a powerful parent company for InnPoints Worldwide and long-time partner CARINO Hotels and Resorts.
Prior to founding InnPoints, Mark owned and operated several successful lodging properties in Salt Lake City, UT and Albuquerque, NM and spent 13 years at Delta Airlines.
In This Episode, Mark Reveals:
- How his experience with the GDS (Global Distribution System) in the airline industry early in his career inspired his applications of it in the hospitality space
- How owning and operating a bed and breakfast led to the vision of his company, InnPoints.
- His entrepreneurial journey with InnPoints – from inception to sale, and the many stages in-between
- Why he chose to join Vertical Booking, leading their expansion of services in the United States as President of Vertical Booking USA
- The various pieces of technology required to connect hotels to the world, from the PMS, to the CRS, the GDS and the OTAs, and how he manages to tie them all together to make running a hotel a whole lot easier