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TRAVELPORT RE-INVENTS ITS NON-AIR STRATEGY Thinking behind GTA sale and Sprice acquisition is now revealed


Issues & Trends – July 2011

TRAVELPORT RE-INVENTS ITS NON-AIR STRATEGY
Thinking behind GTA sale and Sprice acquisition is now revealed

JUST over a year ago, Travelport decided that it would acquire Sprice.com and divest itself of GTA. The GTA decision came to fruition with the announcement earlier this year that Kuoni had purchased the business for $US720 million.

Now the Sprice.com decision is manifesting itself in the release of what Travelport describes as “a ground breaking new hotel booking engine”.

Niklas Andreen said the two moves represent a major strategic shift in Travelport’s approach to the booking of non-air content.

Andreen is the GDS company’s group vice president, hospitality and partner marketing and his global responsibilities include hotel distribution.

GTA, formed just over five years ago by the acquisition of UK-based Gullivers Travel and the addition of
some other travel distribution companies, is a major global provider of hotel accommodation and related land content. But Travelport has now decided that was not where it wanted to be, Andreen said.

This is not because it does not recognise a need for GDSs to broaden their scope beyond their traditional role as airfare distributors to become also significant purveyors of land content.On the contrary, said Andreen, there is a need for GDSs, historically slow to push non-air content, to “re-invent” themselves.
Which is where Travelport’s new hotel booking engine – called “Travelport Rooms and More” and developed from Sprice.com technology – comes in.

The company has conducted research among agents and Andreen said leisure travel agents “told us they were spending far too much time searching for content across numerous hotel booking solutions and websites and then struggling with inefficient booking processes.

“With Travelport Rooms and More we believe we have responded to their feedback by combining the state-of- art technology we gained through our acquisition of Sprice with extensive new and varied hospitality content and a new highly efficient booking engine.”

Andreen said Travelport Rooms and More will pull content from multiple aggregators into a single display, combine it with other content in a single PNR and provide seamless integration into mid and back office systems.

Moreover it will guarantee agents’ commissions. “We will collect com-missions from all aggregators and pay it monthly,” said Andreen.

Speaking earlier this month, he told travelBulletin that Travelport has already signed 20 aggregators and online travel agents (OTAs) – some with global reach, others specialising in local and regional content – and is negotiating with another 30.

Those already signed include bedsonline, Transhotel, LateRooms.com and lowcostbeds.

Roll-out of the booking engine commenced this month. It will be available to all agencies including those who do not use a Travelport GDS platform (Galileo or Worldspan).

According to Travelport’s launch statement: “Travelport Rooms and More combines the consumer insights, metasearch functionality and user interface developed by Sprice.com with Travelport’s core B2B expertise, to deliver a completely integrated hotel booking platform.

“Key benefits for users include comparison shopping across multiple providers and the ability to both book and cancel hotel bookings in the same tool…

“In total, over 200,000 hotel proper-ties will be available to book, often with multiple options available on the same property, giving travel agents complete transparency and the opportunity to select their preferred provider.

Travelport Rooms and More will also include hotel reviews and images as well as rental car content provided by TUI Cars.”

• The announcement of the new hotel booking tool follows a number of other recent announcements from Travelport related to its ongoing investment non-air content, including news of a larger, dedicated hospitality team and new helpdesks for hotel and car supplier customers. (travelBulletin, June).

 

 

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