Client

Global Travel Management Company (TMC) with footprint in more than 100 countries.

Overview

Corporates and Travel Management Companies have contracted and negotiated rates with certain hotels, guest houses, apartments, home stays, and hostel property types. These property types and rates are not available online through any GDS, OTAs, or channel managers.

Key Challenges

Agent Productivity

Dependency on the Fulfilment centre for each offline booking

Revenue Leakage

The problem

It’s not possible to access real-time data when these property types are not available online. Therefore, the inventory, rate management, and the booking process involve manual intervention and require a fulfilment centre to handle the bookings. The tedious manual process leads to revenue leakage.

Identifying the gap

For property types with the contracted and negotiated rates, HotelHub customers have an average of 15% offline bookings. Manually fulfilling these bookings, which constitute 25% of TMC’s hotel revenue leads to revenue leakage.

When online bookings from GDS and OTAs are streamlined, data on the following is captured in segments in an organised and process-driven manner within a system in HotelHub:

• PNR
• Revenue management
• Vouchers
• Reporting
• Other information on travel needs

Even the offline hotel bookings by the fulfilment centres involve manual steps such as calling the hotelier and checking for real-time availability. Each step involves sending emails and faxes manually. As a result, even a simple booking might take about 30 minutes or more.

When the booking is made, the agent has to manually add the segments into the PNR. Many times, these PNRs miss the mid and back-office evaluations. As a result, it is impossible to track offline hotel bookings and their commissions.

The need: complete capture and accountability of hotel booking data

After identifying the business problem, HotelHub offered a stand-alone web-based system called Extranet that allows Hoteliers and TMCs to create and access hotels by themselves and to manage the rates, allocations, and inventories in real-time. This application connects to the HotelHub booking platform of respective TMCs and works seamlessly with the following options:

• Hotel searching
• Hotel booking
• Hotel booking cancellation
• Updating hotel rates like any other channel manager or an OTA

The following are some key benefits of the Extranet application:

• Allows the hoteliers and TMCs to add preferred and negotiated rates
• Supports multiple languages and currencies
• Supports different payment modes accepted by the hoteliers
• Supplements with taxes and fees applicable to cities or regions
• Allows photos, descriptions, and reviews
• Allows agency to set mark-ups and commissions to the loaded rates

Another advantage of using Extranet is that it can be integrated with OTAs and GDS by using XML.

Impact

The Extranet does not require any installation. The hoteliers and TMCs can access Extranet applications from any PC with internet connection. Implementation of the Extranet drastically improves the productivity of offline bookings and increases the revenue of offline bookings.

TMCs and Hoteliers can now generate reports and compare the commission collected against actual numbers. This leads to improved data on rates and on the total commission by the hotel. The reports also ensure better compliance – if a hotel falls short, the TMC can monitor and blacklist that hotel as needed.