Providing an Events Solution to Strengthen & Enhance Customer Experience for University Center Chicago

“Moving to one solution has helped us streamline operations & greatly enhanced the customer experience.”

– Jake Holtz, Director of Sales and Operation, University Center Chicago

University Center is a year-round student housing complex with a full-service conference facility that also offers summer housing to groups and individuals; University Center is centrally located in the heart of downtown, near all major attractions.

They often host a range of clients from small-midsized events, associations, non-profits, continuing education, and a focus on weekend business conferences.

Summer housing serves both groups and short-stay guests, individual leasing for interns, and temporary housing for hotel-style stays, which compliments the conference operation.

You will often find a vibrant mix of dance programs, educational groups, corporate interns, college interns, and more, which love the central downtown location and all of the facilities and services on offer.

The challenge? System overload!

Today, University Center is managed by Peak Campus. It provides not only an outstanding conference center, but on-campus housing for five local Universities, off-campus housing, summer housing, dining, and retail spaces.

The center is a dynamic operation that previously required more than five different software products (separate housing, conference, packages/mail room, maintenance work orders, and more) to meet their overall needs.

Once partnered with StarRez, a robust cloud solution implementation addressed all of their challenges and provided a centralized solution – successfully connecting every department and team on one management system.

A holistic view of Events & Conferences

The conference team at University Center thoroughly enjoys getting the most from the powerful occupancy and functions graph, which provides quick access to the booking activity and allows them to manage the check-in/out, billing, invoicing, and more, with far greater efficiencies.

Guests also get to enjoy the flexibility to go online and create short stay bookings, which, combined with group bookings, helps the operation maintain around 97% occupancy levels. While the Resident Portal helps manage everything from online contracts, maintenance work order requests, invoicing, and more.

What are the StarRez Conference & Events Management Solutions?

StarRez allows you to create and manage end-to-end conferences and events on campus with an easy-to-use solution that integrates with your housing operations and other on-campus systems. Our comprehensive solution features:

• Complete event management
• Online event inquiry for prospective events
• Summer Group Bookings
• Online Short Stay Guest Bookings
• Dashboards, and flexible reporting and communications
• Invoicing and quoting
• Automation Tools
• Front Desk Packages/Mail Room

Check out our Events & Conference solution overview for more information.