#9: Erik Akhmetgaliev, Regional Director APAC, RateHawk
For the ninth edition of our Impact10 series, we hosted a conversation with Erik Akhmetgaliev, the Regional Director, APAC Region at RateHawk. With over 13 years of experience in the travel industry, Erik talked about the influence of technology in the travel space, foreseeable opportunities and shortcomings for the companies navigating their growth journey, along with his insights on the APAC region. Here are more details on this enriching interaction: Firstly, being in the industry with one of the leading travel-tech organisations, could you please share what first drew you to the travel-tech space, and how your journey has evolved over the years? I have been in this industry for over 13 years, so for over a decade. And what initially drew me to travel tech is that it is a global and dynamic industry, where you can see directly the impact of your work across different markets and cultures. I joined RateHawk in 2016, and it was my second job. I started my career at a traditional travel agency. And interestingly, later, this company became one of our first clients. That early experience gave me a very sudden transition to travel tech with a more commercial mindset. Over the years, my journey has evolved significantly. I started in operations, then I moved to sales, building my commercial expertise. From there, I transitioned into launching new markets, leading market research, competitor analysis, hiring local teams on the ground and establishing partnerships with key clients across Europe, Latin America, the US, and finally, I came to Asia, where I built a team of over 50 people within one year. We’ve been focusing on localization since then. Since that time, we have been identifying the critical gaps in product processes and partnerships to ensure sustainable growth. And this led me to my current role of Regional Director APAC, where I focused on scaling markets and shaping the high-performing team. And overall, I am responsible for driving the expansion. Given that you’ve worked very extensively in this APAC region, how has this market shaped your perspective on the travel tech industry? Well, over the past decade, one of the most significant shifts in travel distribution has been the rapid digitalization of the industry. We’ve seen a clear move from the traditional offline bookings to online platforms and API integrations. And this transformation has enabled travel agents and the clients to assess real-time availability, dynamic pricing and a broader range of products all in one place. And additionally, the rise of personalization driven by data analytics and AI have been prominent. Everyone is now talking about AI, and this is definitely a game-changer. What all this means is that travellers are increasingly expecting tailored-made recommendations and more flexible options. Overall, these changes have made the industry more efficient, responsive, and customer-centric than ever before. Have you felt any other major shifts that have happened in the industry or are likely to happen? I assume that in the near future the demand will be more focused on domestic travel, especially after the COVID times. In each region, we’ve observed that domestic travel is increasing, and I believe that will continue happening. As RateHawk, managing such a large accommodation inventory must be really complex. What were some of the biggest challenges that companies face at that scale? Well, it’s a very good question and I think one of the biggest challenges is caused by the high level of data fragmentation across the industry. The global accommodation ecosystem includes countless hotels, third-party suppliers and consolidators, many of whom operate on different platforms and technologies. And there is no unified industry-wide protocol for data change, making integration and communication between systems pretty difficult and resource-intensive. As a result, matching rates and ensuring real-time accuracy becomes a significant challenge. Overcoming these issues typically requires building internal tools, leveraging advanced data normalization techniques, and maintaining flexible integrations to adapt quickly to the diverse landscape of partners and suppliers. Operating RateHawk, Roundtrip, and Zen Hotels, consolidates over 3.2 million accommodation options from more than 350 suppliers across the globe, including over 100 DMCs and 250,000 direct contracts. And thanks to the access to such an extensive inventory, RateHawk is highly valued in the market, so it’s one of our USPs. And it is valued not just as a booking platform, but also as a leading API supplier for global travel tech players. Currently, we are expanding, especially in Asia, since Asia is a very API driven market, and we have over 1,500 API partners overall across the globe, including major OTAs and travel tech platforms from the APAC region, enabling them to grow their business and avoid the hustle of supply consolidation. So, partners can quickly and easily plug into the Red Hawks API, empowered by in-house advanced technologies and partnerships, including, of course, you guys. We really value our partnership with Vervotech Mapping Solution. How do inconsistencies in hotel and room data affect business performance and customer experience at the end of the value chain? Well, it surely affects significantly as the hotel content is often the first touch point which shapes the expectations and establishes credibility before a booking is made. Up-to-date and consistent data is especially crucial and critical in the B2B segment, where travel professionals and travel tech businesses rely on and entrust us with their own reputation and service quality. That’s why we invest a lot in ensuring our customers feel confident in the accuracy of every booking, whether made through our platform, through the back office or through API. Of course, issues happen, but the most important thing is how fast we can solve them. Looking ahead, what would be some advice that you would give to the travel companies that are currently trying to scale while keeping their inventory clean and reliable? You can’t just rely on yourself. I mean, the value of reliable partnerships can be overestimated and overstated. I would strongly advise delegating the complex supply consolidation tasks to those travel tech companies that have already done the heavy lifting instead of trying to do everything on your own. Even with our deep tech expertise and strong development capabilities, we continue to invest in
Rebooking Economics: The Margin Lever Your Revenue Team Is Ignoring
Between the moment a customer confirms a booking and the moment they check in, hotel prices move. Sometimes they move a little. Often, they move significantly. In high-demand corridors during the weeks before arrival, the same room that sold for say, $180 at booking may be available from a different supplier at $140. Your revenue team knows this. What they have not done is build a systematic mechanism to act on it. Most OTAs treat rebooking as a customer service response: if a customer calls with a complaint about a price drop they found themselves, you rebook them as a goodwill gesture. This is the most expensive way to run rebooking, because the cost is absorbed entirely by your margin, and the trigger is customer dissatisfaction rather than price intelligence. The commercial case for rebooking looks completely different when it is treated as a proactive margin recovery operation. Here is the P&L argument your revenue team should be making. The Window Between Booking and Check-In Is an Arbitrage Opportunity A confirmed hotel booking is a price lock at the moment of transaction. The customer is committed. Your supplier’s obligation is set. But the market price of that room does not stay fixed just because the booking was made. Supplier rates change continuously in the period between booking confirmation and check-in: yield management systems adjust based on occupancy, flash promotions run for specific date windows, and last-minute availability pricing creates temporary dips that disappear within hours. The current trends across OTA booking portfolios suggest that about one-fifth of the confirmed bookings will see a lower rate available from at least one supplier within the 30 days prior to check-in. For long lead-time bookings (booked 60+ days out), the rebookable proportion is often higher. The arithmetic is straightforward. An OTA processing 50,000 room nights per month with an average booking value of $200 and an average rebookable margin of $22 per room night has a rebooking opportunity pool of roughly $275,000 per month. On a conservative capture rate of 40%, that is $110,000 in recovered margin per month that currently does not exist in the P&L. That number is not a projection. It is an accounting of what is already there. Why Revenue Teams Have Not Acted on This The gap between the economic opportunity and the operational reality exists for a specific set of reasons. Understanding them is the first step to dismantling them. The mental model is wrong. Revenue management in OTAs is primarily built around demand forecasting, rate shopping, and channel optimization at the time of booking. The period after booking confirmation is treated as settled. It is not. The technical trigger does not exist. Acting on a rebooking opportunity requires knowing that the opportunity exists, which requires continuous rate monitoring against a confirmed booking corpus. Most OTAs do not have this monitoring layer. The data that would tell the revenue team about a rebookable booking does not surface anywhere in their standard reporting. The operational workflow is undefined. Even if an opportunity is detected, rebook to which supplier? On which conditions? What cancellation and re-confirmation flow runs? Without a defined operational path, individual opportunities cannot be acted on at scale, even when they are identified. These are solvable problems. There are no arguments that rebooking is operationally complex. There are arguments that the default state of most OTA operations has not invested in the infrastructure to collect what is already available. The P&L Structure of a Rebooking Operation To make the internal case for rebooking as a margin strategy, the P&L needs to be constructed with specifics rather than approximations. Revenue line: The margin recovered per rebooking is the difference between the original net rate and the new net rate from the alternative supplier, minus any cancellation and re-confirmation fees charged by either supplier. Cost line: The cost of running a rebooking operation includes the monitoring infrastructure (rate watching against confirmed bookings), the API calls for rate lookup and re-confirmation, and the operational overhead for handling exceptions (re-confirmations that fail, cases where the price rebounds before the rebook executes). Break-even math: If your rebooking infrastructure costs $8,000/month to operate and your average recovered margin per successful rebook is $18, you need approximately 445 successful rebooks per month to cover the cost. At a portfolio of 50,000 room nights per month with a 15% rebookable rate and a 60% execution success rate, you generate roughly 4,500 rebooks. The cost is covered in the first 10% of volume. The remaining 90% is pure margin recovery. The Customer Experience Argument Is Backwards The common objection to proactive rebooking is customer experience risk: what if the rebook fails and the customer is left without a confirmed hotel? This objection treats rebooking as a customer-facing operation when it is fundamentally a back-office one. The customer experience of a correctly executed proactive rebook is neutral. The customer’s confirmed hotel does not change. Their check-in process does not change. Their booking confirmation does not change. The only thing that changes is which supplier invoices your accounts payable team processes. The customer experience risk exists only in the event of a failed rebook execution, which is why the operational design of the rebooking system should include a clear success/fail decision point before the original booking is cancelled. You do not cancel until the replacement confirmation is in hand. This is an idempotency requirement, not a technical nicety. Related Read: How to Avoid Poor Reviews & Ensure 5-Star Reviews on Your Hotel Booking Platform Where Rebooking Sits in the Margin Stack Rebooking does not replace mapping accuracy as a margin driver. It adds to it. The two work on different parts of the distribution P&L. Mapping accuracy determines whether your inventory is correctly displayed, matched, and priced relative to supplier reality. A bad match produces wrong content, wrong pricing, and wrong room attribution. The cost is measured in chargebacks, refunds, and suppressed conversions. Explore further: Why Static Hotel Mapping Is Costing You Bookings Rebooking operates correctly matched, correctly displayed bookings that have already been confirmed. The cost base is already paid. The rebooking operation recovers an additional margin from the same booking without any customer-facing change. Together, these two levers address both the quality floor and the margin ceiling of your distribution economics. Vervotech’s Profit Maximizer is built on this model: the mapping accuracy layer ensures clean
