One of the things I love most about technology is discovering industry-changing solutions to problems that we weren’t necessarily even setting out to address.
That’s what happened recently here at DHISCO. While working on new systems for pushing available hotel rate information, or ARI, to two of our major clients, our technologists developed two new tools to help hotels quickly add and update the content travel companies use to sell their properties – reducing from days to just seconds their ability to add new hotels to our distribution chain.
Called Auto Property Build and Product Automation, we believe these two new tools will prove to be game-changers for hotel distribution, giving hotels fast, convenient ways to provide more comprehensive real-time information about both rate plans and property-specific amenities and features, such as whether they have a restaurant and pool and their hours of operations.
Auto Property Build eliminates the need for hotels to manually enter, or load from spreadsheets, content descriptors when adding new properties to the DHISCO distribution chain. Those new hotels are then pushed directly to DHISCO’s demand partners, as are future updates to that content.
Currently, many hotel companies enter only a portion of the inventory because the process is so cumbersome. For instance, one major chain offers only about 20 percent of its product through DHISCO to its specified partners.
With Auto Property Build, hotel companies can load an average of 100 new properties an hour, or 1.6 per minute, meaning companies of all sizes can easily put much more of their inventory in front of global travel sellers.
With Product Automation, hotels can seamlessly update their content and descriptions, making it simple to offer real-time information about services and amenities, rate plans and cancellation and guarantee policies alongside the real-time rate and availability information in the DHISCO distribution chain. It also enables hotels to load and roll out new rate plans automatically – reducing errors while saving time.
Combined, the two products offer a fully automated solution for on-boarding new properties.
Auto Property Build currently works with our push ARI system but will also be available soon across all of our connectivity methods, which we expect will lead to a dramatic increase in our already huge database of more than 500,000 properties available to travel sellers around the world.
That, of course, will drive increased bookings, which means increased revenue for both hotel suppliers and travel sellers. In fact, the first international hotel chain to implement Auto Property Build in our beta test with a major wholesaler saw more than a 300 percent increase in bookings.
At DHISCO, our main mission is always finding and developing new tools to boost business for both our travel selling and travel buying partners. I’d say the team hit a home run on this one.
– Toni Portmann
