CellarPass Maintains Industry Leadership Through Technology and US Coverage

CellarPass, the leading destination to explore, book and share wine country experiences announced that it has completed the much-anticipated service upgrade which includes many new features that were co-developed with some of our leading winery clients. Features that include a completely redesigned backoffice reservation management interface and integration with popular calendaring systems such as Microsoft Outlook, Lotus Notes, Apple's iPhone and iCal and many more. Now, not only do consumers get to use the best technology, they are using the reservation system that offers the most nationwide service.

"We've been working on the latest phase of development for over 6 months now and by working closely with our subscribers, particularly our power users, our development team has delivered more industry firsts for this vertical than any other reservation system for the wine industry", says Jonathan Elliman, Chief Technology Officer for CellarPass. "When we initially launched our reservation service, we came right out of the gate with features and integrations that to this day, none of our competitors have", says Elliman.

Launched in March 2010, CellarPass took the industry by storm by offering seamless integration with Microsoft's Retail Management System, which is the leading Point of Sale system for the wine industry. Then in April 2011, CellarPass launched their integration with OpenTable so that visitors to the Cellarpass website can book with wineries and restaurants. "The integration with popular calendaring system is another first", says Jonathan. "So many wineries have chosen CellarPass over our competitor's simply on our system's interface alone, but we like to think that it's our whole platform that makes the difference too." CellarPass is already in the works of expanding their coverage to include transportation services, activities and more.

With the latest upgrade to the CellarPass service, when consumers or wineries make reservations, they immediately have the option to add the appointment in their own calendar, whether it's on their iPhone, desktop, iPad or any calendar program that is iCal 2.0 compliant. "The calendar integration takes CellarPass to a whole new level as wineries can now sync their CellarPass reservations with their company's internal calendar, allowing employees to plan their resources, being space, hosts, tableware or what have you", continues Elliman. Guests get the conveniece of store their reservation information in their smartphone's calendar with details such as confirmation number, winery contact info, event details and more.

Since January 2011, CellarPass has doubled the number of guests processed through the system with over 4,000 guests in April alone. The trend is expected to continue to grow as CellarPass launches more wineries in other regions such as Finger Lakes in New York and Calaveras in California's Sierra foothills over the next 2-3 weeks. CellarPass already manages over 30% of the wineries in Calaveras County and a handfull in the Seneca Lake wine country have already launched ahead of the official June launch date. CellarPass already has growing coverage of Sonoma County, Napa Valley and has begun expanding into other grapegrowing regions such as Virginia, Oregon and Washington State.

To see a complete list of CellarPass' comprehensive list of features for their popular reservation management service, click here. To see a list of CellarPass' wineries, click here. For more information, contact Jonathan Elliman at (707) 255-4390 or via technology@cellarpass.com. Follow CellarPass on FaceBook at http://www.facebook.com/CellarPass, on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/CellarPass and our Blog at http://www.CellarPass.com/Blog to get the freshest updates.

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