One of the biggest challenges for hotel companies and their demand partners has been how to develop and manage connections that give consumers instant, accurate results for their shopping queries without crashing the hotel companies’ often decades-old, legacy central reservations systems.
Some big hotel brands have used direct connections with demand partners, believing they offer the easiest, most cost-effective way to share real-time rate and inventory with the big players. They assume they can hire a few full-time programmers to maintain those connections and avoid paying transaction fees on each of what could amount to millions of bookings each year.
But as the number of online travel agencies continues to multiply and other travel sellers enter the global distribution chain, we here at DHISCO are seeing a rise in “direct-connect fatigue.” Hotel companies are being bombarded with new requests for data connections. And the rise in use of mobile and new technologies, combined with increasingly complex search parameters, makes those direct connections increasingly complex and costly to maintain.
That’s why DHISCO remains committed to offering the best in “one-to-many connections.” Our solutions give companies an alternative to direct-connect fatigue by supplying OTAs and other travel sellers access to both cached and real-time rates and availability information from hotel companies, large and small, around the globe with one simple connection.
Our solutions have long been attractive to new entrants in the online distribution world. But as the number of players and shopping volume increase, these one-to-many connections are also an increasingly appealing alternative to large hotel companies looking to replace direct connections with more affordable, maintenance-free options.
An important advantage with DHISCO’s solutions are their impact on change management. For instance, when hoteliers make a change to ARI or other content, they not only have to develop the change, but they then have to customize the change to fit each GDS connection and connected demand partner. DHISCO’s solutions avoid both this expense and the time-consuming drag on resources by normalizing the changes. By mapping the changes to GDS and demand partners, DHISCO eliminates the customization work for our supply partners and delivers a consistent, timely change across the board.
Of course, an alternative is for large hotel companies to replace their legacy systems so they can better handle increasingly large and complex loads from the much newer systems used by their online selling partners. But that comes with a price tag well into the tens of millions of dollars and all the risks of cracking open something that already works.
With our one-to-many connections, we offer companies the potential to save millions of dollars in upgrade and maintenance costs while reducing the loads to their systems. It’s a distribution model we believe is more important than ever for meeting the evolving challenges of hospitality distribution and just one of the many ways we are helping our customers connect to the world.
– Greg Berman
