A large global TMC was planning to expand into markets such as Israel and UAE in which it had previously been selling its services via local agencies.
The TMC faced the challenge of standardising accounting processes to maintain operational efficiencies and compliance across offices in markets with different systems and processes. Despite on-going dialogue between the TMC and local partners, no changes had yet been implemented.
The booking platform must be configured for new markets, clients, and users, enabling the content with GDS and commercial relationships with suppliers; booking records, invoicing, and accounting.
Partner markets don’t always use standard products or follow internationally standardised processes. HotelHub therefore had to consolidate the local agency’s back office systems and PNR set-up.
HotelHub adopted a consultative approach to the expansion, which highlighted issues the TMC was unaware of. The HotelHub team’s understanding of the industry and local market needs ensured that the implementation was completed seamlessly, and with all the necessary capabilities built into the solution.
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Airline bookings were the core business of a global TMC with a strong digital offering, employing 18,000+ travel professionals in over 160 countries. Agents’ main focus was on managing air bookings through GDS, whereas hotel bookings were managed through multiple GDS and non-GDS channels.
Agents had to identify hotel booking opportunities in every airline booking and search multiple platforms to find the best and most relevant hotel rates before making the booking. Consequently, agents were de-prioritising hotel bookings, causing revenue opportunities to be missed.
The TMC therefore needed a more efficient way to manage hotel bookings seamlessly between GDS and non-GDS channels and streamlined processes that would make it easy for the agent to tap into new hotel booking opportunities.
HotelHub integrates all GDS and non-GDS hotel listings, bookings, and management in one place. By factoring in TMC and corporate clients’ travel policies, this ensured a simpler process and automated capture of accounting data.
The agent can now automatically identify a hotel booking opportunity and availability for each airline booking. Workflows are now paper-less; policies, TMC or corporate, are configured in the system which displays only valid bookings. All active and passive segments of a PNR and accounting line remarks are automated whilst payments are also integrated, making the system slick and highly efficient.
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A global TMC operating in more than 100 countries, and its corporate clients, had contracted and negotiated rates with hotels, serviced apartments, guest houses, home stays, and hostels not available through any GDS, OTA, or channel manager.
This made it impossible for the TMC to access real-time data for these properties, so inventory, rate management, and bookings required manual intervention and fulfilment. From contacting the hotel to check availability and rates, to confirmation, a simple booking can take 30 minutes or more.
When the booking is made, the agent has to manually add the segments into the PNR. Many times, these PNRs miss the mid and back-office evaluations. As a result, it is impossible to track offline hotel bookings and their commissions.
On average, 15% of business travel bookings are offline but account for 25% of TMC’s hotel revenue. Offline bookings therefore carry a significant risk of revenue leakage.
HotelHub’s Extranet is a stand-alone web-based system that allows hoteliers and TMCs to access hotels independently to manage rates, allocations, and inventories in real-time. Extranet connects to the TMC’s HotelHub booking platform to search, book, cancel and update rates like a channel manager.
As well as allowing hoteliers and TMCs to add preferred and negotiated rates, Extranet supports multiple languages, currencies, taxes, fees, and payment methods accepted by the hotel. The tool allows photos, descriptions, and reviews to be added and the TMC to set mark-ups and commissions to the loaded rates.
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A global TMC with a presence in over 140+ countries with 17,000+ travel professionals was failing to optimise revenues from partner hotel chains because agents were booking through different channels.
Booking through a GDS meant that most data – not all of it – would get captured. Using an OTA meant that the OTA would receive the commission. Booking directly through the hotel meant that the booking data wouldn’t be captured directly into the negotiated deal information.
As a result of bookings made through different channels, no point of integration existed to monitor or capture all booking data, so the TMC was unable to fully leverage negotiated rates, deals and incentives offered by partner hotel chains.
HotelHub’s Agent Booking Tool allowed the TMC and its business travel consultants to focus on hotels with higher commission returns by capturing booking data across multiple channels – including directly with the chain’s hotels – and making it available to agents at the point of sale.
This solution also enabled additional, high-value booking platforms to be created for specific TMC partner hotel chains, de-prioritising other, non-compliant chains. High-revenue generating chains would be prioritised in searches to maximise bookings into that chain.
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