For online travel businesses, accurate and streamlined data isn’t just a technical necessity but an important ingredient to building trust, enhancing search experiences, and skyrocketing conversions. Basically, it is what makes or breaks your customer’s booking experience.
If a traveler searches for a cozy beachside resort on your platform, but instead, they’re met with mismatched names, duplicate listings, and inconsistent details, they’ll probably get frustrated and move on to your closest competitor.
If this scenario feels all too familiar, your online travel business might be suffering from the pitfalls of poor accommodation mapping.
But what is accommodation mapping?
Accommodation mapping is like cleaning, sorting, and standardizing hotel & room data available to customers on your platform to ensure accuracy and consistency and avoid duplication. For travel and booking platforms, standardized hotel & room content means fewer errors, no duplicate listings, and a smoother experience for travelers looking to make an informed booking decision.
It involves two key parts:
A) Hotel Mapping
Hotel mapping ensures that the same hotel listed differently on your booking platform (from different suppliers) is recognized as one unique property, even if the names, addresses, or descriptions vary slightly.
For example:
First listing: “The Royal Beach Resort”
Second listing: “Royal Beach Resort & Spa”
Both refer to the same property, listed differently (from different suppliers).
Hotel mapping standardizes this hotel data, which includes hotel name, geolocation, facilities, etc., and groups multiple listings of the same hotel property under one accurate hotel id so there are no mix-ups or duplicate entries.
Why it matters:
- It prevents duplicate listings of the same hotel
- Ensures the property’s details (like location, amenities, and ratings) stay consistent
- Makes it easier for travelers to find the hotel they’re looking for
Also Read: 10 Best Practices for Nailing Customer Experience with a Hotel Booking API
B) Room Mapping
Room mapping is about preventing travelers from encountering duplicate room listings on your booking platform page, ensuring that bookings are accurate and seamless.
The mapping process standardizes the peculiar room details like bed size, room views, smoking/non-smoking, board types, etc., and displays competitive prices for the unique rooms available.
For instance, a “King Suite with Ocean View” might be listed slightly differently on your platform as “Ocean View King Suite”. With room mapping, all these variations are recognized as the same room, giving travelers confidence that they’re booking the exact room type they want.
Why it matters:
- Prevents booking confusion (like mistakenly choosing a different room category)
- Helps travelers compare room options and prices easily
- Improves the overall booking experience by keeping room descriptions consistent
- Enhances the traveler’s confidence in their booking choice
Both hotel mapping & room mapping create a clear and consistent booking experience for travelers and help platforms avoid confusion or errors.
Also Read: Effective strategies for OTAs to optimize conversions
So, how do you know if you need to implement hotel mapping or room mapping on your online travel booking platform? Look for the signs!
5 Signs Your Online Travel Business Needs Accommodation Mapping
As an online booking platform, you pull hotel and room data from different suppliers, which can often lead to inconsistencies, confusion, and errors in the booking process.
If you’re experiencing any of the following signs, it’s a strong indicator that your platform would benefit from Accommodation Mapping to ensure smooth, accurate listings and improve the customer experience.
1. Duplicate Hotel Listings Across Multiple Suppliers
The same hotel appears multiple times on your platform, each time with slight variations in the name, description, or address. For example, “Beachfront Grand Resort” might show up as “Grand Beach Resort” or “The Grand Beach Hotel” from different suppliers.
Here’s why it’s a problem:
- Multiple listings of the same property can confuse customers, making it difficult to compare prices or make the right choice.
- It clutters your platform with duplicate entries, which can overwhelm users and reduce the credibility of your site.
- It leads to inefficiencies in inventory and booking management.
Also Read: What is hotel mapping and why it matters for your online travel business
2. Inconsistent Room Types and Descriptions
Room types and their descriptions may differ slightly between suppliers. For example, a “Deluxe Ocean View Suite” on one platform might be listed as “Ocean View Deluxe Suite” on another. This inconsistency can make it difficult for customers to compare rooms across suppliers.
Here’s why it’s a problem:
- Inconsistent room descriptions can lead to confusion, and customers may book rooms that don’t match their expectations.
- It makes it harder for users to understand exactly what they’re booking, which can lead to dissatisfaction and cancellations.
- Suppliers may have different naming conventions or room classifications, making it challenging to maintain a uniform experience.
With a room mapping API, you can standardize the room descriptions and consolidate them into a consistent format. This ensures that every room, regardless of its listing source, is recognized correctly and displayed with accurate, uniform descriptions.
3. Availability Inconsistencies and Overbooking Risks
Your platform displays rooms as available, but those rooms have already been booked through other channels or suppliers. This occurs when availability data from different suppliers is not synchronized.
Here’s why it’s a problem:
- Overbooking creates a poor customer experience and risks your relationships with both travelers and hotel suppliers.
- It can damage your platform’s reputation, leading to customer complaints, cancellations, and lost trust.
- Lack of real-time synchronization can result in operational headaches for you and your hotel suppliers.
With accommodation mapping, your platform automatically updates the availability data from all suppliers into a single, real-time system. When a room is booked through one supplier, its availability is immediately updated across all channels, preventing overbooking and ensuring accurate inventory management.
4. Price Discrepancies Across Multiple Suppliers
The same hotel room might show up at different prices depending on which supplier provides the data. For example, a “Deluxe King Room” may be listed at $150 on one supplier’s page and $160 on another.
Here’s why it’s a problem:
- Price discrepancies can lead customers to believe they’re being misled or unfairly charged.
- If your platform displays inconsistent pricing, it can cause your users to question the reliability of your service.
- Inaccurate pricing may result in lost revenue or missed sales opportunities.
Room mapping ensures that pricing data from all suppliers is aligned, so the same hotel room is shown at the same price. This avoids confusion and helps you maintain competitive, transparent pricing for customers.
5. Lack of Control Over Data Accuracy Across Suppliers
You have trouble ensuring that hotel and room data is accurate because it comes from multiple suppliers with varying levels of data quality. For example, some hotels might have outdated photos or missing amenities listed, leading to poor customer experiences.
Here’s why it’s a problem:
- Customers may expect one thing based on what’s shown but receive something different.
- Managing data manually from multiple sources increases the likelihood of errors.
- You may miss opportunities to update or improve listings, such as adding new photos or promoting key amenities.
With accommodation mapping, all hotel and room data are unified into a centralized system. This gives you control over the accuracy of your listings, ensuring that each property is shown with the most up-to-date information, including photos, amenities, and descriptions, across all platforms.
If you come across any of these signs, integrating mapping APIs in your online booking platform is your best bet to improve its performance.
Try Vervotech’s AI Mapping solutions at no cost.
About Vervotech:
Vervotech is a leading Hotel Mapping and Room Mapping API that leverages the power of AI and ML to quickly and accurately identify each property listing through the verification of multiple parameters. With One of the industry’s best coverage of 98% and an accuracy of 99.999%, Vervotech is quickly becoming the mapping software of choice for all leading global companies operating in the travel and hospitality industry. To learn more about Vervotech and the ways it can enhance your business in the long run contact us: sales@vervotech.com
