TRAVEL buyers will have a new hotel booking platform to shop on when Travelport Rooms and More rolls out progressively in markets worldwide from July.
The one-stop site pulls together content from over 20 aggregators and online travel agents, with more than 200,000 properties represented.
A new and improved version of existing online leisure portal Travelport Leisure, Travelport Rooms and More allows agents to compare deals across aggregators – thanks to meta-search technology from Sprice.com, which was acquired by Travelport last May.
The site can also be accessed via a single sign-on, with commissions from multiple sources collated and paid out monthly. Commissions are roughly between five and over 10 per cent.
When asked how the online platform compared to its GDS offerings, group vice president, global hospitality, Niklas Andréen told TTG Asia e-Daily that although the GDS served the business travel community well, leisure and mixed travel agents needed a tool that offered efficient access to information on amenities, consumer reviews and pictures.
“It is not one replacing the other, but rather each solving different problems,” he said.
Andréen said the classic GDS product was only meeting 10 to 15 per cent of the hotel needs of leisure and mixed travel agents, while the figure was 60 per cent for business travel agents.
Agents do not have to be Travelport GDS subscribers to use the new service. GDS users, however, would have the added benefit of integrating their air bookings with hotel purchases.
Travelport expects to have as many as 50 aggregators by year-end, having already secured a range of leading hotel and car content providers. These include Agoda, Kuoni Connect, LateRooms.com, Transhotel, Ctrip, Zuji, Cleartrip and TUI Cars. An arrangement with GTA, which Travelport sold to Kuoni, is being worked out.
This move is part of Travelport’s drive to grow its hospitality arm, having recently invested in a larger, dedicated team and created new helpdesks for hotel and car supplier customers (TTG Asia e-Daily, March 18).
