Jennifer Harrington-Snell

Signature Flight Support (Booth No. 7070) has appointed airline and travel veteran Maria Sastre as the company’s chief operating officer for global operations. Sastre previously served as United Airlines’ vice president of worldwide customer satisfaction, where she managed strategy development, airport operations, international call centers and financial management. 
Most recently, Sastre has been president and CEO of Take Stock in Children, a nonprofit organization. Previously, she also served as vice president of Royal Caribbean Cruises’ International, Latin America, Caribbean and Asia division, and vice president of operations. She began her career at Eastern Airlines and Continental Airlines. 
Meanwhile, Signature has selected the HotelTrak Web-based hotel reservations tool from Global Crew Logistics. HotelTrak allows Signature customer service representatives to make hotel reser- vations quickly at pre-negotiated discount rates. 
HotelTrak connects to the Sabre reservations system, and discount rates are already pre-negotiated by Global Crew Logistics. Signature can use HotelTrak to view and sort transaction history and future reservations by passenger, fleet, aircraft type, cost center, customer, location or other unique data fields, according to Global Crew Logistics. The HotelTrak system saves time for FBOs because customer service representatives no longer have to make hotel reservations manually or negotiate rates with each hotel. 
“We needed a hotel reservations tool that would enable our customer service representatives to book a hotel quickly and would ensure that we were securing the best rates for our customers while at the same time optimizing the overall process,” said David Best, Signature Flight Support chief commercial officer. Signature deployed HotelTrak at its 58 U.S. FBOs on March 31 and is adding the system at the company’s international FBOs.&nbsp;

New developments at FBOs including regulations and noise issues; legal disputes; openings, acquisitions and mergers.