Sunday, September 28, 2014

Rich guest profiles

1. Very different from earlier travelers, technology savvy

2. First place to start is to start capturing customer data with the eventual goal of collecting Rich Guest Profiles

3. When guest comes through OTA, there is very little information about the guest.

4. How can we find an influential?

5. Massive amount of data at hotel's disposal?

6. Why to rich guest data matters?

Personalized ad 9X times more effective

7. The means by which companies can acquire, analyze and apply customer data to thie operations and marketing

8. CRM is an unfulfilled promise. 15 years back there was a CRM boom, there was this promise that we would be able to collect rich databases of guest information to enable one-2-one marketing

Thursday, September 25, 2014

What is channel management?

http://www.kraukoblog.com/travel-technology/hotels-connectivity-a-stake-for-the-whole-travel-industry/

1. How can a hotel sell rooms?

a. Direct channels (walk-in, phone, own website)
b. Third party (hotel chains, OTA, metasearch)

2.

The channel management solutions are tools to update rooms’ prices and availability on several channel.

a. Updaters : The first generation of channel management tools are the updaters. They allow hoteliers to update several distribution channel from a central point.  However they only offer a one way connectivity, which means the solution doesn’t handle real time bookings. The reservation are received through fax or email.

e.g Fastbooking, eRevMax

b. “switch” or 2 way connectivity platforms

The information flows in two directions between the hotel PMS and third parties allow the hotelier to update availability and rates without the need to split the inventory between channels and with no risk of overbooking.

AvailPro, Interface Technologies, TouriSoft, SiteMinder


http://www.tnooz.com/article/tues-siteminder-ceo-qa-mike-ford/ (Mariott using Siteminder)





APIs

1. TravelPort Universal API

http://www.travelport.com/Products/Travelport-Universal-API

2.  Sabre Dev Studio

http://www.boxever.com/product

Profile building options

1. Acxiom Audience operating system

http://aos.acxiom.com/

2. Revinate

http://www.revinate.com/

Demystifying metasearch

http://www.tnooz.com/event/webinar-demystifying-hotel-metasearch/

1. How do you make money?

a. CPC
b. CPA
c. CPM

2. Summary




3. What is difference between OTAs and Metasearch providers?

a. OTAs take creditcard, Metasearch do not

4. Travelport merges GDS and non-GDS content and makes it available to metasearch providers

5. Problems with metasearch
a. Content
b. No UX
c. No personalization

6. Leonardo's exclusivity agreement expire in a year or so. ICEPortal will then get price down.

7.















8. Google’s Hotel Finder, to Priceline’s purchase of Kayak, to the $30 million investment by Expedia in Room 77 - OTAs getting into metasearch business