[thelist] Hotels

Simon Perry thelist at si-designs.co.uk
Tue Jan 11 12:45:45 CST 2005


john at johnallsopp.co.uk wrote:

>Hi
>
>Hotels. How do they work then?
>  
>
Depends on the size!

>Let's imagine for a moment you have a hotel website to build. You can
>build a static site to promote it. Then you add a room booking system
>that takes a booking, tells the customer it's not booked until you get
>confirmation, and then emails the hotel owner to make the booking.
>  
>
Why not get the hotel to put a percentage of their rooms on free sale 
for the web app so that you can offer instant online confirmations? If 
they get a direct booking that requires the rooms then they can edit the 
allocation manually for that one date. All rooms revert back to the 
hotel x days prior to the current date at which time the online client 
requests a room or is prompted heavily to call.

>Obviously, it would be better if it were live. But getting a hotel to
>maintain the records of which rooms are booked when is a non-starter.
>So it has to be integrated with their internal booking system. Anyone
>any thoughts or experience with that kinda thing?
>  
>
I'm not sure if the Open travel alliance [0] have anything on 
integration of internal booking systems but they do have schema for 
sharing travel products over the web.

>Then, how do most hotels get their bookings? Through aggregators
>maybe? Presumably if I typed in www.hotels.com I'd get to choose a
>hotel somewhere and maybe book a room, then the www.hotels.com system
>would talk to www.myhotel.com and book the place. From myhotel.com's
>point of view, do I register with lots of those booking services or
>just one? If lots, I presumably have to create lots of interfaces or
>file formats to keep them happy. Or is there a centrally agreed format
>for such things?
>  
>
A lot of hotel services either have allocations or free sale agreements 
with hotels and chains or they use the larger players who are already 
available on GDS[1] systems where there are APIs you can use. The format 
issue is the main remit of the Open Travel Alliance so in theory you 
should only need to create a WSDL that complies to their schema.

>Or, do some hotels eschew all that and just take bookings direct and
>pocket the saving?
>  
>
Many hotels will take bookings direct at rack rate which is usually more 
expensive than the offers put out through hotel booking services. Just 
like the low cost airlines any hotel would prefer to make a £20 loss on 
a Monday night room rate than a £40 loss if it went empty. Booking 
services are excellent outlets for distressed dates.


Simon

[0] http://www.opentravel.org/
[1] Global Distribution Systems:- Worldspan, Amadeus, Sabre, Galileo


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