Bakkt Holdings, Inc. (“Bakkt”), a technology platform that enables partners to unlock crypto and drive loyalty, announced a deal with Caesars Entertainment (“Caesars”), the largest casino-entertainment company in the U.S. To launch this pairing, the state-of-the-art live entertainment venue at Planet Hollywood Resort & Casino, formerly known as Zappos Theater, will be renamed Bakkt Theater. Also, the companies’ collaboration includes plans to allow Caesars Rewards^® members the ability to redeem their Rewards Credits through Bakkt^® Crypto Rewards, pending regulatory approval. Bakkt and Caesars will continue to explore and innovate around Bakkt’s existing suite of cryptocurrency solutions. Additional details on this offering and the timeline for rollout will be shared soon.

“As today’s customers grow to be increasingly savvier online, we look forward to offering new crypto options to millions of Caesars’ customers,” said Bakkt’s Chief Marketing and Sales Officer, Mark Elliot. “We’re thrilled to solidify our relationship with Caesars with the naming of Bakkt Theater and the integration of Bakkt Crypto Rewards into the Caesars Rewards program.”

As the digital economy continues to evolve quickly, Bakkt and Caesars are committed to ensuring their customers have a seamless experience, both online and through more traditional customer retention methods. This commitment continues to guide Bakkt in its development of leading crypto solutions and has helped shape the award-winning Caesars Rewards loyalty program, the most extensive loyalty program in the gaming industry.

“We are constantly looking for new and unique ways we can expand the wealth of benefits associated with Caesars Rewards, and it is that consistent push to improve that makes Caesars Rewards best-in-class,” said Megan Rodriguez, Senior Vice President of Loyalty and CRM with Caesars Entertainment. “We look forward to exploring how Bakkt’s crypto offerings will differentiate Caesars Rewards and help us continue to be the leader in this space.”

With more than 60 million members worldwide, Caesars Rewards is one of the largest and most acclaimed loyalty programs in the world. A fully connected ecosystem of gaming, hospitality, entertainment, nightlife, dining, and shopping, more than 50 destinations, and a full suite of mobile products, including Caesars Sportsbook and iGaming, are tied to the Caesars Rewards network. Members can earn and redeem credits across the network for the experiences they value most. Caesars Entertainment is focused on building loyalty and value with its guests through a unique combination of great service, excellent products, unsurpassed distribution, operational excellence and technology leadership.

Through this relationship, the Bakkt brand will come alive in Las Vegas as the namesake for one of The Strip’s most influential theaters. Since 2013, the newly renamed Bakkt Theater has been recognized as the epicenter of A-list entertainment in Las Vegas.

“Bakkt Theater showcases the best in live entertainment and experiences to match the extraordinary talent roster the venue features,” said Jason Gastwirth, President of Entertainment for Caesars Entertainment. “We’re pleased that Bakkt recognizes the unique destination we’ve created at Planet Hollywood, and we are excited to have them join us in the venue’s next chapter.”

While world-class content and the venue’s capabilities set it apart, amenities and guest experience, including VIP table seating concept, bottle service and multiple seating configurations that allow artists to create the vibe that best suits their show, further distinguish Bakkt Theater from other venues in Las Vegas. With its unique combination of nightlife-inspired amenities coupled with world-class live entertainment content, Bakkt Theater continues to be a premier performance destination in Las Vegas.

Bakkt and Caesars will share additional details on forthcoming crypto offerings soon. Legends Global Partnerships represented Caesars Entertainment in sourcing and negotiating the strategic agreement with Bakkt.

Solutions Travel, a new Travel Management Company, announces a partnership with Spotnana to use Spotnana’s Travel-as-a-Service Platform as the core infrastructure powering its travel business.

“After decades championing change, I’m excited to bring new innovation to the corporate travel marketplace through the launch of a new TMC built from the ground up on Spotnana’s new modern infrastructure,” said Mark Walton, CEO of Solutions. We will deliver the most advanced travel technology, coupled with a strong service orientation, real time data, direct content sources, and other integrated components.”

“We showed Spotnana to Travel Managers who were wowed by what they saw. Once we realized that Spotnana’s modern cloud-native platform could be white labeled, rapidly deployed, and easily integrated with other systems via open APIs, we decided to build a company around it,” said Walton.

Solutions will use Spotnana’s entire Travel-as-a-Service Platform, including Spotnana’s Online Booking Tool, Agent Desktop, Booking Engine, System of Record, and Content Engine.

“We’ve selected Spotnana as our exclusive travel platform to differentiate ourselves and accelerate our time to market. Corporate clients want a new travel model with integrated applications, flexibility, ease of use, and access to more content. To deliver on this, we needed a travel platform that goes far beyond a traditional Online Booking Tool and has been designed from day one to serve as the foundation for a modern Travel Management Company,” said Walton.

“We’re delighted to partner with Solutions Travel and provide the core infrastructure that enables them to power a new generation of traveler experiences,” said Sarosh Waghmar, Founder and CEO of Spotnana. “Mark and his team are industry innovators who share our vision. We look forward to partnering on future enhancements to Spotnana’s Travel-as-a-Service platform that will add value to all Spotnana and Solutions customers.”

Solutions offers a broad range of personal services from experienced agents including VIP Service all available 24/7/365 in a multilingual environment. Clients can reach Solutions via all communications channels; phone, email, chat, and text. All are integrated to track service levels.

SevenRooms, a global guest experience and retention platform for the hospitality industry, has announced a new solution and expansion of its marketing suite for hospitality operators worldwide: Email Marketing. The product will work in conjunction with SevenRooms' Automated Emails, a set of personalized, trigger-based emails sent to customers on behalf of the operator, to continue to engage guests once they've visited a venue.

Email Marketing enables SevenRooms customers to send one-time, customized marketing emails directly within the SevenRooms platform to give operators more control over the way they use their guest data. Having ownership of this guest data allows operators to build their brand through direct touchpoints with guests to drive loyalty and repeat visits. It also provides detailed insights into email performance with metrics that matter to their business, including showing the reservations, covers and revenue attributed to each email.

Email Marketing supports operators with a solution that is connected throughout a restaurant's tech stack and removes the need to use third-party email service providers that create additional work for staff trying to manage email preferences across multiple systems. It is directly linked to the SevenRooms CRM and operating system giving operators full control over their messaging and who receives it by using Auto-tags or Client tags to segment marketing audiences. Additionally, operators using Email Marketing have the ability to create either fully customized emails with an easy-to-use visual editor or utilize curated templates.

The new product also enhances the experience for guests of SevenRooms customers by allowing them to stay in touch or up-to-date with their favorite venues, receive targeted messages and promotions, or simply control the venues from which they receive marketing. Leveraging Email Marketing, restaurants can use their guest data to tee up relevant, customized emails. For example, sending guests who have purchased wine at least five times an invite to a dinner with their sommelier, or excluding guests with shellfish allergies from an email about their annual clambake.

"SevenRooms Email Marketing product provides restaurants with functionality that simply does not exist in the email marketing platforms that restaurants traditionally use," said Allison Page, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at SevenRooms. "We enable restaurant marketers to leverage their robust SevenRooms guest database to quickly and easily build targeted campaign segments, eliminating the need to manually export and import mailing lists between systems. While other email service providers promise revenue, SevenRooms can prove it with accurate data on the revenue generated by each campaign to truly measure email marketing performance."

"The combination of SevenRooms' Email Marketing and Automated Emails makes guests feel very connected with us," said Alyssa Fenu, Sales & Marketing Manager at Mango's Tropical Café. "Being able to choose who our emails are going to — a specific customer segment or broadcasting to our whole database — makes the process a lot simpler. And it's super easy to understand how many people opened our emails, how many people actually made a reservation, and how much money we're making because it's all in one place."

Ooma Inc., a smart communications platform for businesses and consumers, today announced the company’s Ooma Office service has won PCMag’s prestigious Business Choice Award for Best VoIP System for the tenth year in a row.

The award (https://www.pcmag.com/news/business-choice-2023-the-top-voip-service-for-your-office) comes from the magazine’s annual Business Choice surveys of its readers, with Ooma again emerging as the top provider of VoIP phone service among 18 finalists including RingCentral, Microsoft Teams, Vonage, and Google Voice.

“For the 10th year in a row, Ooma takes the lead in our annual VoIP survey,” PCMag said in its story on the award. “The service remains far ahead of most of the competition in almost every metric.”

• Ooma’s overall satisfaction score of 8.6 out of 10 is a half-point ahead of the second-place finisher and is 1.3 points above the average for all 18 VoIP service providers included in the survey results.
•  Ooma’s Likelihood to Recommend score of 8.8 is 0.4 points ahead of the second-place finisher and 1.5 points above the average.

Ooma Office  offers a set of features curated to meet the needs of small and medium businesses. Customers have their choice of interface – conventional analog phones, IP phones, virtual service through the Ooma Office desktop and mobile apps, or any combination of the four. Advanced features such as a virtual receptionist, ring groups, video conferencing, text messaging, call queueing and multi-site access combine to make small businesses sound big.

Helbiz Kitchen launches its second kitchen in Los Angeles, located in the Westwood area. This new location will enable Helbiz Kitchen to cater to a wider customer base across the city, in addition to the recently opened Santa Monica kitchen.

Helbiz Kitchen is renowned for its commitment to high-quality products, with a strong focus on taste and flavor. The menu of each brand available in Los Angeles is the same as the menus offered in Milan, ensuring that customers can experience the same authentic taste and quality that Helbiz customers in Italy have come to expect.

The first three brands, Burger & Sons, Pokaii, and What the Farm, will be available for customers to order via the Kitchen United MIX App, on-site kiosks, and third-party apps like UberEats, DoorDash, and GrubHub.

Helbiz Kitchen plans to open in Austin, Texas, and New York City later this month.

Duetto, a provider of Revenue Management Software (RMS), unveiled its premium revenue optimization product, Duetto Advance, at ITB Berlin.

With event demand intelligence now ingested from PredictHQ, the introduction of Advance once again makes Duetto the industry’s Game Changer in revenue management tech. 

Duetto Advance combines several industry firsts:

• Instant events-related intelligence data from PredictHQ
• Dynamic Optimization: all rates are optimized in real-time
• CommandCenter: one easy-to-use customizable dashboard

“Duetto Advance enables hotel revenue teams to optimize rates in real-time, using clean, usable data delivered in a visually actionable dashboard customizable to your revenue strategy needs. This is truly an industry first for our field,” said Darren Koch, Chief Product Officer, Duetto.

“In today’s ever-changing market, real-time analytics that ingests market data as it happens is vital for hotels to complete and lead their markets,” Koch added.

PredictHQ: The Duetto / PredictHQ integration provides event-related market intelligence, enabling revenue teams to be proactive about what is happening in their markets, taking calculated decisions on pricing and restrictions, and optimizing operations.

"By incorporating intelligent event data into Duetto’s revenue management platform, we are unlocking a new way for businesses to make data-driven pricing decisions that optimize revenue and enhance customer experiences ahead of surges in demand. By using enriched event data to surface relevant, impactful events, it enables them to optimize and make calculated decisions around pricing in advance to match real-world conditions. Our system not only collects, enriches, and verifies millions of events every year, but it also provides sophisticated features which companies like Duetto can leverage to paint a complete picture of demand," said Campbell Brown, Co-founder & CEO, PredictHQ. 

Dynamic Optimization: Provides real-time monitoring of market conditions to ensure pricing is responsive and dynamic. With powerful signal detection based on live booking activity, Duetto Advance can target situations where there is a sudden change in demand, resulting in an opportunity to quickly raise prices to capture the profit opportunity.

CommandCenter: Enables hotels to Advance property and portfolio performance via an intuitive and actionable dashboard focused on current and forward-looking data points across the guest journey. This multi-property management portal will guide Directors of Sales, Operations, and Revenue Management to focus on what truly matters - driving more profitable outcomes.

Duetto Advance is a premium addition to Duetto GameChanger – the world’s #1 RMS. GameChanger helps hotels maximize booking revenues and profits. It empowers hotels to sharpen revenue management strategies through innovative technology and its Open Pricing methodology. Duetto Advance will become available to Duetto users in Summer 2023.

The Duetto revenue strategy platform also includes BlockBuster for contracted group business optimization. Working with GameChanger, BlockBuster helps hotel revenue teams discover the optimal blend of group and transient business at the right rate, at the right time.

For reporting and forecasting, our ScoreBoard application enables revenue teams to create forecasts in minutes, create custom reports and receive business insights instantly in interactive dashboards.