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. 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. 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
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.Vervotech Mappings 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 Mappings 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 Mappings and the ways it can enhance your business in the long run contact us: sales@vervotech.com
Curated Content in Modern Travel & Hospitality
Hotel & Room Names Addresses Geolocations Amenities Value-Added Services Prices Promotions Discounts Policies Local Laws & Regulations Vervotech Mappings 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 Mappings 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 Mappings and the ways it can enhance your business in the long run contact us: sales@vervotech.com
5 Reasons Why Your Travel Company Needs Hotel and Room Mapping Tools
Are you an OTA or hotel distributor? Do you end up paying a refund to your customer by selling the wrong hotel or room due to duplicate or wrong or poor inventory description? If yes, then you need to understand hotel and room mapping. Currently, the accommodation segment of the hospitality industry relies on multichannel distribution to gather hotel data. Different accommodation providers such as metasearch, OTAs, tour operators, bed banks, consolidators, intermediaries, and suppliers, display the unique names of the exact same hotel or room, leading to duplication and bad customer experience. This ongoing industry-wide challenge can be solved through hotel and room mapping tools. Hotel mapping tool aggregates data of various hotel properties from different sources, resulting in standardized and unified hotel data. Some of the hotel data are hotel name, hotel address, geocodes, property type, hotel images, etc. Whereas room mapping tool works in a similar fashion as hotel mapping. It intelligently analyzes, identifies and sorts multiple rooms sent by different suppliers via various parameters such as room type, amenities, bed type, description, policy, etc., so that the same room does not get listed on your portal twice. Let’s dive into why your travel company needs hotel and room mapping tools. Why Hotel & Room Mapping are Important for Travel Businesses Here are five reasons why any business that sells hotels or rooms should invest in hotel and room mapping tools. #1 Remove duplicate hotel and room listings When tour operators or OTAs source hotel data from more than one supplier or distribution partner, there is a possibility of duplicate hotel data and inconsistent hotel listings. This duplication issue can hurt your travel business and end-user experience. To solve this, every travel business must invest in hotel mapping software. Automated hotel level mapping tool delivers standardized hotel data for each property and removes duplicate listings from your hotel inventory. Similarly, room level mapping provides enriched room content, both descriptive and illustrative, with zero duplicates. Recommended: Hotel Data Duplication: How To Solve The Growing Challenge For Hospitality Industry #2 Up-to-date hotel and room data Did you know your travel platform could be selling stale hotel content that could impact your business and customer experience? Stale content majorly occurs when you don’t keep up with the constant changes that hoteliers make, such as room availability, address change, new upgrades in amenities, etc. The ideal way to optimize hotel and room data is through mapping tools. Hotel and room mapping removes outdated and incorrect information and provides an up-to-date hotel property list and room content. This will ensure that your platform has the freshest content for your customers, enhancing your customer retention and brand loyalty. #3 Maximum hotel inventory coverage Did you know OTAs, tour operators sell only 60% of the hotel inventory? This results from unmapped hotel inventory, leading to business loss and missed booking opportunities. Hotel and room mapping gives you a business advantage to sell hotel inventory that was previously out of sight to customers. Currently, leading mapping providers offer maximum hotel coverage of 98%. #4 Hotel data ownership on distribution channels As an accommodation provider, it’s easy to lose ownership of your data in the swarm of multichannel distribution. But with the implementation of hotel and room mapping, you instantly regain control over how your data is showcased on distribution channel websites or portals. Mapping ensures that any change in your property listings is instantly reflected in the master database of the distribution partners. This way, irrespective of how often your data is distributed, you have complete ownership of your hotel and room data. #5 Smooth content distribution Due to the fragmentation of distribution channels, it becomes difficult for travel businesses to distribute hotel and room content efficiently. This causes data inconsistency, data unavailability, data loss, stale data. The good news is hotel and room mapping simplify hotel content distribution smartly, letting travel businesses focus on revenue-generating tasks and business-critical functions. As a travel business, you must have hotel and room mapping in your distribution strategy. Without mapping, your platform might have duplicate listings, inaccurate data, stale information, which can directly lead to revenue leakage, impact your customer booking experience and put your brand reputation at stake. It’s time to leverage technology, make mapping part of your business strategy, and deliver a frictionless end-user experience. 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
