Hilton HistoryCategory|

Creating Industry Firsts: The Multi‑Hotel Reservation System

This Week in Hilton History


In 1948, Hilton was the first to install a multi-hotel reservation system. A few years later Hilton Reservation & Customer Care (HRCC) was formed to centralize reservations processing. Originally known as HILCRON, the reservation service was a revolutionary office for the hotel industry where travel agents could reserve a room at any property with a call to one, central location via telephone, teletype and telegram. The first Team Members manually processed 6,000 reservations in May 1955 using a few telephones and huge availability boards. By the early 1970s, the availability boards were replaced by computers and integrated phone systems – and in 1973 – Hilton implemented HILTRON, the industry’s first totally automated reservation and availability management system. Today, there are more than 4,500 HRCC Team Members across the world, many of whom are able to work remotely from home. Explore the photos to see how customer support and hotel experience processing has evolved.