Corporate agency consortium Hickory Travel Systems and TravelClick, a provider of e-commerce services for hotels, have partnered to devise a system that will allow Hickory’s preferred hotel suppliers to deliver custom ads and offers to GDS users who subscribe to Hickory's hotel program.
Called Hickory Ultra Connect, it is believed to be the first GDS advertising plan that focuses only on a handpicked portion of travel agencies.
Ultra Connect also allows the advertiser to refine promotions by targeting a subgroup among the more than 3,000 locations that subscribe to the Hickory hotel plan, according to Ann Albano, Hickory's vice president of hotel relationship management.
TravelClick delivers hotel ads to GDS screens and can measure the dollar value of bookings made from those ads.
Albano said Hickory subscribers already are making annual sales of about $600 million by clicking through ads delivered by TravelClick, but those ads could come from any hotel company, not just preferreds.
Albano said she asked TravelClick a year ago if it could deliver ads for preferred hotels exclusively to Hickory’s stable of subscribers. Her problem was one of pushing agencies to give preference to the preferreds, a challenging task given all subscribers are independent businesses.
Another issue was ensuring that each subscriber’s sales be clearly identifiable to the hotel company. Therefore, the custom ads will include the unique Hickory rate codes.
These matters have become more important in recent years, as larger hotel chains have changed the terms of their Hickory contracts from paying a flat fee to paying Hickory based on business delivered, Albano said.
Albano said emails and newsletters had limited value because they too often did not get to the front-line sales agents, and they certainly were not in front of the agents at the point of sale.
Ultra Connect's first buyer is Benchmark Hospitality. TravelClick will write the ads, Albano said, after which it is up to Benchmark to choose the timing. The ads could be on the GDS screens within 72 hours after TravelClick gets the green light, she said.