How Duplicate Hotel Listings drop sales of Travel Booking Websites?

Most travel booking websites today are trying to give their users with best online booking experience. However, there are still many major pain points that need to be addressed! As it’s said for every business, the customer is the king, and to keep them as loyal returning customers, OTA’s are trying their best to deliver the needs of customers to the best of their abilities. For this, OTA’s are looking to technological advancements and leveraging their business with the help of travel technologies in order to gain that critical competitive advantage.

One such major pain point for most modern OTA’s is duplicate hotel content. Imagine you are booking an awaited trip but when you land on the booking website, you notice that the hotel that you were looking for is repeated multiple times with different hotel prices. Doesn’t it break the seamless customer experience? You might even leave the booking website within seconds and never visit that site again due to the poor booking experience.

Let’s look upon an example of duplicate hotel content on a famous booking website:

Here the same hotel is repeated multiple times with different hotel room rates. For any booking website, this issue can make or break their business and impact their user’s experience tremendously.

So, why does this issue of hotel duplication occur in the first place?

Before understanding the solution for removing hotel duplicates, let’s understand the reasons behind hotel content duplicity. As depicted above, the main reason behind this is the growing number of suppliers constantly pushing hotel content to travel databases.

These inconsistent duplicate listings from suppliers can’t be removed manually (or is extremely time-consuming and labour-intensive in most cases), so most of the OTA’s end up with tons of duplicate hotel rooms, and they then receive angry feedbacks from confused online users.

In order to understand the problem better, here is a graphic for more clarity:

For displaying hotel content, OTA’s have to source their hotel data from multiple suppliers, and during this process, sometimes those multiple suppliers provide the data for the same hotel multiple times. This data is collected and combined, and then reflected on the OTA’s websites. The inconsistencies in hotel content from multiple suppliers result in duplicate hotel content on the travel booking websites.

According to the stats of the sale cycle, the global online travel market was worth more than $629 billion in 2017 and is predicted to reach almost $818bn by 2020. Going by this statistic, we can now understand the power of online booking and OTA. Looking at the whooping rise, any serious problem while booking can result in huge losses to the online travel agencies.

So, is there any solution to tackling this ever-growing problem of duplicate hotel content now that we know the main reasons behind hotel duplicates? Let’s fall back upon the extraordinary power of technology and dig products that can work wonders in removing millions of duplicate properties within seconds. Since manually filtering millions of properties and then removing duplicates is near to impossible, the travel technology ninjas are here to help!

By leveraging the power of technology, travel businesses are making use of AI and ML to constantly filter their database and provide the most accurate and opinionated content to their users. The technology that is helping businesses achieve this is called hotel mapping. Hotel mapping is the method of aggregating hotel properties from varied sources in an organized manner to avoid inconsistencies and duplication in hotels found on any given website or platform. It guides you to take control of the integration process by mapping all your hotel data and providing your customers with the best possible listings thus leading to increased conversions and an enhanced customer experience.

Hotel Mapping is an excellent solution that adapts to consumer needs through the application of modern technologies. Most OTAs opt for automated means where a hotel aggregating API is used to get the job done with ease and without errors. This helps travel businesses to build trust with their customers by aiming to prevent end-users from booking the wrong hotel thus evading losses incurred from cancellations. If you want to learn more about hotel mapping, then make sure to give this blog a read, where we take a deeper dive into the nuances of the technology and the ways it is transforming modern global businesses.

We, at Vervotech, understand the importance of the role we tech companies play in the travel industry and we are constantly working towards bettering our products and services to better serve the travel businesses. Our AI-based hotel mapping API, Vervotech Mappings, leverage the power of machine learning to uniquely map hotel content with a 99.99% accuracy and can uniquely map hotels with a mapping speed of more than 3 million properties per day.

Hotel content without duplications on the travel booking websites can prove to be a USP for any OTA. For this de-duplication, hotel mapping is proving to be a king in the travel industry.