Different terminologies for hotel wholesalers in the travel industry
A wholesaler is a third-party marketplace that sources hotel inventory (room nights, rates, hotel amenities, packages) in bulk from hoteliers, and accommodation providers and then sells them to travel sellers such as OTAs, travel agents, DMCs, and tour operators. Travel suppliers offer hotel rooms and hotel content (hotel address, room images, amenities), which is then shared with the travel sellers. From a B2B perspective, wholesalers play a prominent role in connecting travel suppliers (hoteliers) and travel sellers (OTAs, DMCs). Some wholesalers focus on working in niche markets or specific hotel types, while others buy all types of hotels and distribute them globally. Through wholesalers, hotels generate more sales and OTAs get hotel products in bulk at a cost-effective price. Interestingly, wholesalers do not sell or distribute hotel inventory directly to travelers. But, any novice in the hotel and accommodation sector can easily get confused by the complex distribution channel. Along with that, wholesalers are coined with various names that can confuse more about the already complicated hotel distribution system. Here we are to help you know the different names of wholesalers. 11 different names of wholesalers Hotel suppliers Hotel merchants Bed banks Consolidators Hotel brokers Hotel aggregators Hotel vendors Demand partners Hotel providers Hotel banks Hotel distributors Hotel suppliers Wholesalers are also called as hotel suppliers in North Americas. Hotel suppliers play a prominent role in sourcing and acquiring hotel products in bulk and selling them to hotel buyers such as OTAs, tour operators, DMCs, etc. Hotel merchants Long before the evolution of the internet, wholesalers were named hotel merchants. Hotel merchants would sell hotel inventory offline to their networks, which was considered a reliable selling platform for accommodation providers. Bed banks Bed banks are online version of traditional wholesalers and been a part of the hotel distribution for last 20 years. They are B2B platforms that contract supply directly from hotels and accommodation providers in bulk. Wholesalers are named bed banks mostly in European and UK market. Consolidators Hotel consolidators are businesses that buy hotel rooms or accommodations in bulk and resell them at discounted rates to their customers. They don’t have direct contracts as bed banks but function in a similar fashion. Hotel brokers Wholesalers are popularly known as hotel brokers in USA and Mexico. The business operations of hotel brokers are the same as consolidators and thus, sometimes hotel brokers are also called consolidators. Hotel aggregators In the APAC region, wholesalers are commonly named hotel aggregators who became popular in the mid-2000s. Their business model is slightly different from wholesalers; however, they are middlemen in the hospitality industry that rents hotel rooms on lease and takes care of the marketing and operational functions of the hotel. Hotel vendors Wholesalers are also universally known as hotel vendors, selling hotel products to travel buyers such as OTAs, DMCs, TMCs. It’s worth mentioning that hotel vendors are often confused with hotel amenities vendors; however, both vendors are highly different in their business. Demand partners Wholesalers in the travel industry are also popularly called demand partners in the USA. They work with accommodation providers and operate similarly to the traditional wholesalers of the hospitality industry. Hotel providers Hotel providers is another popular name of wholesalers in the B2B marketplace of the USA. They deal with hotel products such as hotel rooms, availability, room rates, amenities and have direct contracts with the hotels. Hotel banks Wholesalers are also commonly known as hotel banks in different regions of the USA. They work like bed banks, buying hotel rooms in bulk and selling to OTAs, tour operators, etc., in bulk at a reduced price. Hotel distributors In some regions of the USA, and Europe, wholesalers are also known as hotel distributors. These intermediaries operate as wholesalers negotiating special discounted rates with accommodation providers and selling it to OTAs, DMCs, tour operators, etc. Wholesalers are considered essential to the travel industry because they are the link between hoteliers and OTAs, metasearch engines, tour operators, DMCs, etc. Wholesalers provide the products and services that travel sellers use to run their businesses, including room nights, rates, hotel amenities, packages and much more. In every region across the globe, the wholesalers are named differently, but their business model is like the traditional distribution. We hope the different names of wholesalers help you understand the competitive hotel distribution landscape better.
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
udChalo, a Leading Travel Services Provider for Defense Personnel, selects Vervotech to Expand their Travel Service Offerings
PUNE, India, Sept. 4, 2019/PRNewswire/ — Vervotech, the emerging travel technology company known for its AI-based offerings, today announced that udChalo, a brand of UpCurve Business Services, an Online Travel portal for Defense personnel, has selected Vervotech’s NEXUS Platform to launch its hotel service offerings for its valued customers in the Armed Forces. Earlier this year, Vervotech Solutions launched a new-edge Travel technology platform – NEXUS, a single API to connect to all suppliers. udChalo was looking for a solution that would allow themselves to connect to the best content sources and make them available for their customers. In addition, to continue to thrive in the quickly evolving and fast-growing global travel industry, the company needed a platform to accelerate bookings and optimize their commercial relationships with the company’s travel partners like Oyo and Fab Hotels, to name a few. “udChalo aims at making life simpler by building a convenient and cost-effective platform for the soldiers to access travel services and Vervotech is helping us achieve this goal for our Hotels offering,” said Varun Jain, udChalo’s Founder and CEO. “Through our partnership with udChalo, we are very proud to partner with and offer our services to Defense personnel. As a company, we aim to provide the Armed Forces travelers who book through the channel of udChalo with the best search speeds, up-time, and accuracy of all the information in a booking flow,” said Sanjay Ghare, CEO of Vervotech. udChalo – founded in Sept 2012 – to honor the brave men for their hard work, dedication, sacrifice and their unwavering families for the sacrifices they make for the nation’s safeguard, and the graduates from the Army Institute of Technology. udChalo partnered with the travel suppliers to provide concessional travel booking services exclusively to soldiers for all their travel needs and is proud to be the ‘Recognized Travel Partner for Indian Armed Forces’. udChalo – www.udchalo.com – is rated among India’s 10 Most Promising Online Ticket Booking Companies in 2019 by Silicon India and was chosen ‘Travel startup of the year 2019’ by Entrepreneur India.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
