Looking for a hotel room with “polacc?” Or maybe you want to make sure it includes “lxbthtl” and “satchan?”.
Those are the abbreviations your system might need to know if you are looking for pool access, luxury bath towels and satellite channels. And they are just a few of the hundreds of often baffling terms hotels currently use to describe their properties through online booking systems.
But in an age where consumers can, with just a tap of their finger, watch live feeds from friends and family across the globe or use virtual reality to transport themselves anywhere in the world, content is king. And abbreviations no longer make an adequate content strategy.
Travelers today don’t just crave rich content, they demand it. In addition to photos and video, they want easy-to-comprehend descriptions and direct answers to simple things, like whether a hotel has free Wi-Fi, a pool or free parking; what local transportation options are available; and when hotel restaurants and other facilities are open.
But, like most aspects of hotel distribution today, meeting these demands is complicated. For many companies, the same constraints on legacy hotel systems that led to this generic “system speak” being created in the first place remain. The industry has also grown accepting of incomplete room information.
At DHISCO, we have been working hard to transform content for our hotel partners around the globe so their travel-selling partners are able to access complete and easy-to-interpret descriptions that will encourage more bookings across multiple online channels.
It’s no small task. Every hotel company has its own room codes. And there are a lot of them.
To get started, we mined the room information shopping data of 20 large hotel brands, finding a total of 590 common abbreviations. Each hotel brand had an average of 250 unique abbreviations, with one large hotel brand having 1,050 distinct abbreviations.
Then we looked at the most searched items, converting the data into distinct room names and descriptions without abbreviations.
The result? We created DHISCO’s Content Transformation service, which mines and extracts data from travel searches, then creates a new data store that enables hotels to update their content automatically.
In other words, we do the heavy lifting by capturing and delivering actual room information from real-time shopping data, then transforming those acronyms, abbreviations, uppercase fonts and phonetics into information everyone can read.
We’re excited to be the first hospitality distribution company to offer this Content Transformation service to our partners around the globe. It’s just one of several exciting new projects we’ve established to turn the vast amounts of data flowing through our switches into the intelligence our partners can use to grow and compete in this fast-changing world of travel technology.
– Anne Cole, vice president, content
