The client
The world’s leading business partner for managed travel operating with 17,000+ travel professionals and boasting a presence in over 140 countries. This global travel management company (TMC) was losing out on opportunities to maximise its revenue from partnerships with specific hotel chains and turned to HotelHub for help.
Key challenges
Lack of standardised booking
Inability to promote select preferred hotel chains
Lost revenue from hotel chains
Industry background
Large TMCs typically negotiate direct contracts with large hotel chains for better deals and incentives on hotel reservations. For instance, a TMC could negotiate a deal that would guarantee a doubling of its incentive or base commission on achieving a booking of 10,000 room nights for the TMC’s customers over one year.
Since the volume of travel bookings managed every day is high, such deals can easily help TMCs increase their revenue from hotel bookings. There’s a catch though – booking hotels that are a part of the chain and earning additional incentives is not completely straightforward.
When TMC agents book through different channels, they get different rates and commissions from each one. For instance, bookings made through online travel agencies (OTAs) won’t earn commissions for a TMC; it goes to the OTA.
The problem
The existing system at the TMC was not equipped to efficiently monitor bookings across multiple clients and platforms for the same chain of hotels. This made it difficult for agents to monitor and promote bookings that would earn greater revenue.
Since multiple bookings were made from different channels that had no single point of integration that could monitor or capture all the data, it was nearly impossible for the TMC to leverage negotiated rates, deals and incentives offered by partner hotel chains for maximum revenue.
The existing system was also unable to:
- promote selective preferred hotel chains to relevant corporates
- recommend high-value booking platforms for the hotel chains
- monitor the bookings made on the hotel chain accurately, to enable the calculation of commissions or incentives due.
Whichever way the TMC looked at it, the lack of a unified system was resulting in revenue losses.
The HotelHub solution
HotelHub built a solution that allowed TMCs and their agents to focus on hotels with higher commission returns.
- A common platform was developed through which agents could access multiple booking channels and that would capture all booking information.
- The platform allowed promotion of specific, high-value booking channels for particular hotel chains, pushing other channels lower on the list of preferred booking channels. For example, a 5-star hotel could be blacklisted for booking through an OTA while promoted to be booked on a GDS.
- Specific hotel chains could be promoted and ranked higher in the search order to improve bookings on that chain.
- The platform could also process ‘On Request’ bookings (bookings made directly with the hotel whenever hotel rates are not available on the GDS) ensuring that direct bookings are also accounted for in the total number of bookings with a hotel chain.
Key achievements
Enhanced traceability
Enchanced traceability of hotel bookings across clients and channels
Increased leverage
Increased leverage for better rate negotiations with hotel chains
20% increase in bookings
20% increase in bookings of preferred hotels within 2 months of implementation
The Result
With HotelHub’s strategic solution, the TMC was able to develop a clear strategy and shift the volume of bookings from low-revenue to high-revenue opportunities.
The share of bookings with the partner hotel chains increased by 20% over just 2 months and the TMC was able to achieve their targets for the year, resulting in additional revenue of USD 500,000.
Example testimonial eg Our sales team generated an additional 25% revenue within the first year of using HotelHub.
Firstname Surname
Job Title,
AMEX Global Business Travel
