Hotel data duplication: How to solve the growing challenge for hospitality industry
In the travel industry, customer experience plays a paramount role in driving business growth. Every travel business strives to deliver the best customer experience, which results in customer loyalty and brand reputation. Seamless user experience has become the need of the hour. However, the hoteliers and accommodation segment often face the brunt of dissatisfied customer experience due to repetitive or missing hotel data information. 8 out of 10 website visitors land on a travel booking website, search for a hotel property or resort, and abandon the site without completing the booking. One of the main reasons for this is showing up of the same hotel property multiple times with different pricing. But why does this happen? Let’s delve deeper into the complex hotel distribution system. Table of Content Hotel Distribution System What is Hotel Data Duplication? Impact of Hotel Data Duplication How to approach Hotel Deduplication with AI? Hotel Deduplication with AI Mapping Conclusion Hotel Distribution System Hotel distribution begins with a property management system (PMS) which gets connected to a central reservation system (CRS). A CRS is an online hub that gathers complete hotel data such as hotel address, geocodes, ratings, rooms, phone numbers, descriptive and illustrative content. From the CRS the data is then fed between the PMS and the major distribution channels such as global distribution system (GDS) (Amaedus, Sabre, Travelport), OTAs (Expedia, Trivago, Booking.com), metasearch sites (Skyscanner, TripAdvisor, Google), tour operators, bed banks, etc. Also Read – Hotel Mapping Accuracy vs. Coverage – What’s More Important? What is Hotel Data Duplication? Let’s first understand hotel data duplication and then offer a solution to the bottleneck. Typically, hotel data includes hotel names, addresses, geocodes, star ratings, phone numbers, hotel facilities, images, etc. Approximately, 6 resellers are involved in selling hotel data to the customers. As the hotel data gets widely distributed amongst various channels, booking partners there is a possibility of the same data being displayed differently. This is known as hotel data duplication. This can easily confuse the visitor creating a bad user experience and jeopardizing the hotel’s reputation. Due to the involvement of several sellers, booking partners, the hotel content quality deteriorates, and unfortunately, hoteliers or resort owners have no control over what’s being displayed about their hotel property on third-party booking channels. Read more: How Duplicate Hotel Listings Drop Sales of Travel Booking Websites? Impact of Hotel Duplication Duplicate hotel data is an industry-wide challenge and can have a lasting effect on the overall business growth. Some of the impacts are: Poor customer experience Negative brand reputation Missed sales opportunities Wasted marketing efforts 1. Poor customer experience According to new research from Expedia Group, 80% percent of French travelers and nearly 90% of UK travelers say photos of the hotel room play important role in their purchase decision. If the traveler encounters the same hotel photos repeated on the booking website, it can confuse them and impede the platform’s ability to fulfill customer experience. 2. Negative brand reputation Data is the element that your brand credibility is built on and duplicate hotel data can easily harm your brand reputation. If your database has multiple records of a single hotel property, it can mislead your website visitors and make your potential customer think twice before visiting your site again. 3. Missed sales opportunities Poor quality data filled with inconsistent, inaccurate or duplicate records in your database, can negatively impact your sales strategy. Duplicate data can result in missed sales opportunities which will jeopardize your business revenue. 4. Wasted marketing efforts Every travel business works on creating the best hotel marketing strategy to boost online booking rates. But if your visitor experiences duplicate information on your platform, it can easily break your robust marketing efforts. How to approach Hotel Deduplication with AI? How can the hospitality industry resolve this challenge and deliver a better customer experience? An ideal approach to solve this bottleneck would be to hire trained content managers and manually remove duplicate data from databases. But this can be laborious, time-consuming and an expensive task. Hotel mapping is the answer to data duplication. It is the process of aggregating hotel properties from multiple sources into one entity. Hotel mapping creates a unique property code that helps identify each individual hotel. This creates standardized content for third-party channels so that they can sell the right room at the right property to the right customer. Currently, there is an advancement in hotel mapping technology. It leverages the power of AI and machine learning to remove duplicate hotel inventory across various distribution channels and uniquely map content with maximum accuracy and coverage. Hotel mapping ensures unified data that ensures accurate content distribution to booking channels globally. With hotel mapping, hoteliers can optimize and have better control of their hotel data. They can manage and distribute standardized descriptive content to their booking partners easily and efficiently. Hotel Deduplication with AI Mapping There are several advantages of hotel mapping. Some of the known benefits are Better control and visibility of hotel data Better content quality Improved look-to-book ratio Up-to-date hotel property listings Improved user experience Better return on investment (ROI) Increased revenue Read more: Curated Content in Modern Travel & Hospitality Conclusion Hotel data duplication is a pressing issue for everyone in the travel industry. It can quickly lead to unsatisfied customers, wasted budgets, and loss in revenue. Hotel mapping is the ideal solution to turbocharge your online presence and distribute content efficiently without data duplication. Several tech companies meet the growing market demands and offer bundled or stand-alone hotel mapping solutions. With the right tech partner, hoteliers or suppliers can forget about hotel data duplication and focus on delivering a stellar guest experience.
Is Bliesure the Future of Business Travel?
Business travelers are returning faster than the industry predicted. Global Rescue reports about 60% of business travelers had at least one multi-day domestic business trip by July 2021. And nearly one-third of those travelers also flew internationally. Still, the complete rebound of business travel is a little too far, and it will take time. At the same time, this emerging trend of Bliesure is pulling loads of employees back on the roads and in the open air again. The mental makeup of the Millenials, the new generation, is a strong reason why Bliesure Travel is taking off. They are not taking vacations – time off from work, which is why they are burning out faster than their older peers. Also, businesses are now gradually understanding – virtual meetings could be an alternative to face-to-face meetings, but they cannot replace them. Personal interaction is still the most effective way to build and maintain professional relationships, nurture trust, and drive your company’s growth. That said, let’s first understand what is Bliesure and what makes it different from conventional business trips. What is Bliesure? Bliesure is an amalgamation of business and leisure, allowing employees to add vacation days to their business trips. It’s basically a business trip with an additional leisure component added. There are two ways to chalk out a Bliesure trip: add leisure days at the start or end of a business trip; it’s good mostly when traveling alone or in a group. Another way for Bliesure is to take friends and family on the trip, where you take time off every day to do leisure activities, and the company fully sponsors it. The Bliesure as a concept is not new; it has been around for some time now. The significant difference is now when the travel industry is recovering from the slump of the pandemic; marketeers are fuelling this term. But it does not anyway limit the potential of Bliesure as a concept. Organizations can use bliesure to attract a good talent pool, offer it as an additional employee benefit, and it can play a significant role in employee retention. Also Read – A B2B One-Stop-Shop for Trip Planning: Essential in Today’s World How Can Bliesure Transform Business Travel? Apart from the benefit that businesses and organizations can drive from bliesure, bliesure travel opens heaps of growth opportunities for the travel industry. Let’s look at three leading ways the travel industry can take advantage of the Bliesure buzz: 1. The Bliesure Messaging Messaging is essential; you can’t sell what you can’t publicize. So, travel businesses need to create packages for Bliesure and start reaching out to the planners, which are still in the early booking process. Alternatively, travel businesses can directly reach out to business travelers. Start the messaging process by educating travelers about the concept of bliesure. Send educational content, run ads or launch a full-fledged marketing campaign to target business travelers who might be interested in the idea of bliesure. 2. Cost-Effective On-Trip Offerings For business travel, it’s mostly planners, in-house or third agents that make all the booking arrangements. And the agents prefer to book room blocks for sales meetings and conferences to get competitive rates. The business travel planners and agents always try to get maximum travel benefit on corporate rates, and they are very price-conscious. So, you cannot sell them, which goes even slightly above corporate rates. But you can always sell cost-effective on-trip offerings that make your venue more appealing. And convince them how you can make the leisure part more enjoyable for their travelers. 3. Value Addition on Experience Once you are able to convince planners and agents, they will do free marketing for you. While you need to understand the limitations of Bliesure travelers, they can only extend their trip for a few days, not weeks. So, you have very little time to make their Bliesure experience worthwhile. Recommended: Five Emerging Technology Trends in Travel Industry Every four out of five business travelers spend about five hours figuring out – what they can do once they are over with business obligations. That’s where the opportunity lies; you can incorporate athletic activities, water sports, special meals, hiking, and biking into your package. And sync these activities with travelers’ business obligations. Supposedly, they can enjoy these activities if they have a day off during the trip. Else, they already have extra days for the leisure part of their bliesure trip. Make sure you inform the planners of every activity. As mentioned earlier, they will do free marketing for you. Because they also have to justify their choices. The Bliesure might not be a new phenomenon. Still, it has great potential to boost the travel activity in its new avatar when so many Travel and Marketing companies are pushing it in the public eye. And it can potentially become a new norm for business travel.
