Under pressure to counter online discounting, the trade is rapidly embracing a surge of new and more efficient technologies for agencies to find and book the right hotel at the right price for each customer.
Hotel programs have been around for decades, and non-GDS hotel booking portals have been operating for at least the last 10 years. But the new breed of portals and apps take booking efficiencies to new levels.
For starters, ABC Global Services and Thor Travel Services, both long known for their hotel programs, are about to introduce new hotel booking engines.
Then next month, Hickory will implement a new “electronic booking path” through its extranet, PartnerHQ. And the American Marketing Group is creating a proprietary hotel database and booking engine that it will roll out in the fourth quarter to agencies affiliated with Travelsavers and the Network of Entrepreneurs Selling Travel (NEST).
As previously reported, Orbitz last fall agreed to give the American Express Retail Travel Network access to its merchant hotel rates with a 12% commission.
Also last fall, Travel Leaders Group introduced Stream, a program enabling agents to sell prepaid hotel rooms for 12% commission on rates that match online travel agency (OTA) prices. Stream is available to members of every group under the Travel Leaders umbrella, including Travel Leaders franchisees and Vacation.com members.
This month, Travel Leaders announced it would create a global hotel program for all affiliates, eliminating the need for third-party aggregators.
And most recently, CCRA Travel Solutions and Ensemble announced a deal to deliver a private-label hotel portal for Ensemble agencies. Last year, CCRA had contracted to deliver a private-label hotel portal to GlobalStar, along with data collection services.
These developments are being driven by growing pressure on agencies, consortia and vendors alike to improve efficiencies in agency operations. On the leisure side, agents feel a defensive need to be competitive with the OTAs. On the corporate side, travel management companies need better data for all parties: customers, suppliers and themselves.
Following is a summary of what has been put in place recently and what’s in the pipeline.
ezBook by ABC
ABC Global Services is preparing to deliver ezBook by ABC, probably by the end of this quarter, said Cynthia Kropp, executive vice president for marketing and business development.
While reluctant to provide details, she said ABC will provide multiple inventories, and it is working with outside content providers and with outside companies to develop the technology.
The company currently offers its Premier Hotel Program with 30,000 hotels. These ABC preferred hotels will be part of ezBook.
ABC was founded in 1978 as ABC Corporate Services to provide a 24/7 emergency service called TESS. A couple years ago, Kropp said, the firm, now a wholly owned subsidiary of Thomas Cook, sold TESS to the American Marketing Group and changed its name. The booking portal, she said, was a response to continuing changes in the industry.
ABC serves more than 7,000 agency locations worldwide, including agency groups and corporate travel departments. Kropp said, “We absolutely envision group deals” for ezBook, too.
Thor’s portal
Thor Travel Services, which serves 2,000 agencies, is creating a hotel booking engine in response to customer requests, said John Kennedy, managing director.
He said he doubted the tool could be ready by the fourth quarter. The delivery date depends on how much programming will have to be customized, but “we should be able to build off a basic booking platform,” he said.
Differentiating itself from other plans, the Thor portal won’t be about aggregating hotels and rate categories, Kennedy said. The value of the Thor preferred-hotel program, he said, lies in its 30,000 participating properties; there are no plans to add others. “We promote our partners first.”
The reason for a Thor booking tool, he said, is that agencies want custom features that let them communicate effectively with travelers after bookings are made “to show their value to customers.”
Signature, known as a leisure cooperative with an upscale clientele, relies on the Thor Worldwide Hotel Program for clients seeking corporate rates.
Ignacio Maza, Signature’s executive vice president, said the group will use the new Thor engine in tandem with its proprietary electronic system to book Signature’s preferred properties.
Kennedy said the Thor product, while better suited for leisure, also has applicability on the corporate side for agencies serving small accounts.
Now owned by Travelport/Blackstone Group, Thor was founded in 1977 to provide Thor24, a 24/7 emergency service, which it sold in 2006 to American Marketing Group.
Hickory’s PartnerHQ extranet
In September, Hickory Global Partners, a collection of corporate travel agencies, plans to launch its “electronic booking path” via a new extranet called PartnerHQ, which was rolled out this spring.
Brian Harniman, Hickory’s executive vice president, said members will use PartnerHQ as an entry point to the GDSs to book 25,000 preferred hotels using the unique HFH (Hickory for Hotels) code.
Currently, members also receive offers under a different promotional code, but with the PartnerHQ enhancement, Harniman said, the hotels will be able to offer net rates.
Meanwhile, PartnerHQ will enable Harniman to sell advertising specific to one or a few cities, so a Boston hotel could buy a banner ad that appears on the agent screen only when the agent searches for Boston choices.
Hoteliers could also pay for biasing by city, he said. Revelex is the vendor for the booking technology.
PartnerHQ is part of the data collection and sorting project that Hickory and TRX announced in mid-July to enable agencies and suppliers to monitor productivity on a daily basis and make decisions accordingly.
AMG’s hotel booking engine
The American Marketing Group’s Travstar Technologies unit is developing a hotel booking engine to help agents compete with OTA discount rates, but with a database ranging to the luxury category as well, said Jim Mazza, COO of Travstar Technologies and Travelsavers.
AMG’s existing rate program, bookable in GDSs, will be blended into the new program, he added.
The system will be rolled out to affiliated Travelsavers and NEST agencies before the end of the year, Mazza said, adding, “This is a proprietary product developed exclusively for AMG agencies. I don’t think any other group has done anything like this internally.”
Essentially, he said, Travstar has “reinvented everything,” from booking technology to accumulating data from 70,000 properties. Some of the hotels, he said, will pay premium commissions or offer value-add amenities, and users could configure the system to manage independent contractors.
He said AMG developed the system in house so “we don’t have the cost of another middleman.” That enables AMG to “be more competitive on pricing and commissions benefiting our agencies.”
CCRA’s private-label engine
CCRA Travel Solutions, provider of products to thousands of North American agencies on an individual basis, concluded a deal to provide services to all Ensemble’s 850 companies in the U.S. and Canada under one contract.
The package includes a private-label version of CCRA’s proprietary hotel booking engine and access to CCRA’s rate codes in all major GDSs.
In May 2011, CCRA concluded a pact with London-based GlobalStar to develop GlobalStar’s branded hotel reservations system, HotelStar.
Ensemble members can use the CCRA rate code in the GDSs to book the 26,300 hotels with which CCRA has negotiated rates.
In addition, CCRA’s basic hotel portal — available to agencies with or without GDS contracts — provides access to 180,000-plus hotels worldwide and enables agents to search in one to five rate categories appropriate for specific clients.
The database includes the 26,300 properties in the GDS negotiated-rate program. In Ensemble’s version, displays at the portal will bias toward more than 500 properties in the Ensemble Hotel & Resort Collection.
These services come at no additional cost to individual members.
Libbie Rice, Ensemble co-president, said Ensemble needed an online hotel booking engine, good for those members without a GDS or for those wanting “more breadth of rate products.” It offers air and cruise booking options, and “this was another obvious tool.”
She expected the GDS rate codes to be in place almost immediately and the customized portal to be fully launched at Ensemble’s conference in October.
GlobalStar’s deal is older than Ensemble’s, but its private-label portal, HotelStar, for now is just the front end for the CCRA database.
Mark van Iersel, executive director of marketing and partner recruitment for GlobalStar, said the organization of corporate agencies hopes to incorporate members’ unique deals into HotelStar by the end of the year.
For GlobalStar, merging unique preferred-hotel deals into the CCRA package is more complex because agencies have deals specific to their markets, and GlobalStar counts 89 partner agencies with 3,509 locations in 75 countries.
GlobalStar had used ABC Global Services’ hotel collection but switched last year after concluding CCRA had “better content” and “more sophisticated” monitoring of agency booking activity by supplier, by preferreds and by rate code.
GlobalStar plans to implement its own rate code worldwide, but Pincus said the partnership would continue nonetheless.
Travel Leaders’ program
Travel Leaders Group, which owns Vacation.com, announced this month it would create a worldwide hotel program designed for the exclusive use of all its wholly owned, franchised and member agencies. Travel Leaders said it would discontinue using third-party aggregators.
Travel Leaders spokesman Steve Loucks said the company is creating its own hotel database and has “reached out to major hoteliers worldwide to bring them in as foundational partners.”
As for the technology, he said, it is not certain if there will be additional third-party providers. The plan is still in flux but, Loucks said, it will probably include some custom development, too.
Travel Leaders will build on existing tools, including Stream, the GDSs and intranets that agency affiliates currently use.
One company unit, Travel Leaders Corporate, recently joined Radius. Loucks said it will not use the Radius hotel program.
Meanwhile, Chris McAndrews, Radius’ senior vice president for marketing and business development, said the group of corporate travel specialists is “exploring providing additional booking options” for members, but has nothing to announce.
Orbitz-Amex agreement
Finally, American Express and Orbitz have implemented a plan to give the rep agencies access to the Orbitz merchant hotel rates.
When the plan was announced last fall, Ellen Bettridge, then vice president of the American Express Retail Travel Network, said, “I think customers are very savvy nowadays. They go online. ... They call direct. This is an opportunity for agents to offer them what their customers are finding online.”