Hotel suppliers – which ones do you need?
As the travel industry continues to evolve and shifts more bookings online, the minimum requirement presented by travel companies to the end customer must also evolve.
Unlike travel agencies that guide the customer towards certain products by identifying their likes and dislikes, the online booking process is primarily unguided. Instead, driven by price and user reviews, customers shop and compare until they make that booking. So the name of the game here is variety. Travel companies need to present a portfolio with a certain critical mass of hotels, a global footprint, and a large variety, allowing the customer to best decide which hotel they want to book.
This means the OTA or tour operator will have to supplement their direct hotel contracts with third-party contracts. Enter third-party hotel suppliers. Through technical integrations, the OTA or tour operator will grow its hotel portfolio by outsourcing the long tail product from third-party hotel suppliers.
So then, what criteria should one consider when looking to integrate third-party supplier hotel content?
1 Footprint – where are the hotels? What countries and cities?
2 Competitive edge – avoid “copy cat” companies that offer the same product as everyone else through yet more third parties. Look for a unique concept with a clear edge. Exclusive hotels, rate protections, exclusive rate plans (e.g. non-ref), exclusive availability.
3 Content is king – ensure that you’ll have good static content quality with comprehensive text descriptions, facts and facilities, photos… and all in the language that you require.
4 Technical performance – how are their response times? Failed bookings ratio? If you need cache data, how is the quality of their offline data structure?
5 Financial requirement – what is the expected minimum annual turnover? What is the deposit amount required?
6 Commercial support – how helpful are the account management people? Are they proactive?
To that respect, here at ANIXE, we believe in quality…not quantity. We prime ourselves on our supplier qualification process and the underlying quality of service we provide together with their support. “We come batteries included” says Amr Mohsen, Business Development Director at ANIXE. “The industry seems to think competition by numbers works. But I feel it has achieved overkill. It has become the new 'me too' claim of the hotel supplier world. If you walk down the tech hall at any fair you’re bombarded with mega claims. 1,000,000 unique hotels!! 500 hotel suppliers!! Its about quality, not quantity… I assure you.”
Have a look at our current hotel supplier portfolio. Do you see something interesting for your business? Contact us to connect to quality third party hotel supply!.
ANIXE provides the product through an API Integration, cached data exports, or a white label front end. Using configurable business logic, hotel deduplication, and automated room-type mapping Resfinity presents the cheapest available offer. Integrating the Resfinity API means you don't have to worry about the complexity of dealing with different suppliers, each with their own business logic, coding structure etc. We do all that for you. Resfinity comes batteries included.
Resfinity provides unique modular products and services wrapped around the API, geared towards giving you more control over the sourcing and distribution processes. Supplier Management, Sales Profiles, and custom Product Definitions are some of our major differentiators in the market. The Resfinity Hotel Platform is integrated into various major tour operating and distribution platforms, with the ultimate goal of complete global connectivity for the travel industry.
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See our dedicated solutions for travel industry representatives:
Tour Operators / Online Travel Agencies / Travel Agents / Destination Management Companies / Airlines
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