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Room With a View...Fast insight into Hotel IT
December 5, 2011 - As part of
the European Hotel Technology Next Generation (HTNG) conference held in
Berlin
(November 14-16, 2011) where Hospitality experts from hotel chains and
the
technology vendor community shared the latest technological
advancements that
shape the industry, Amadeus presented its perspective on the impacts of
search
engines and OTAs on hotel systems.
Whilst the distribution landscape has seen the growing importance of OTAs (Online Travel Agencies), travelers now increasingly shop and book from new emerging channels such as search and meta-search engines, as well as social media sites. As smartphones and tablets are more sophisticated, a wide range of travel and hotel apps create new and more addictive shopping capabilities for travelers. While guests are looking for information and convenience, the norm now is to surf all these new multiple sources of information and at the same time, compare results to find the best hotel, the best deal, the best location and the best amenities, etc. that will match what we expect from our hotel stay. As we anticipate a growth of on-line direct and indirect channels to generate more than 50 % of hotel reservations by 2020, we also anticipate that meta search players will increasingly be involved in the search process and that they might be used in 20% of the cases. In a way the tone and standards have been set by the way we search on Google, and searching for a hotel should be as simple as any other search that we make, plus adding the parameters that are important to our choice. With that in mind, hotel systems should adapt to new search paradigms such as search around a geographical zone, geo localized data, ratings from users, by budget, by period, by fuzzy search criteria and all at the same time. This has three main consequences on hotel systems. First is the scalability and reliability of systems to support heavy traffic. The new shopping and search process creates exponential traffic to hotel systems which for example have to absorb nearly 200,000 transactions a day (the equivalent of 2 transactions per second) from just one search engine. How to scale systems up to absorb this traffic and how to avoid lengthy response times to the user? Second is the accuracy of information provided. How to keep a high level of accuracy while guests are searching through multiple channels simultaneously? Third is the cost. How to scale resources up and down to adapt to traffic peaks, and how to design new shopping functionality without facing high development cost? These shopping trends have been the norm for airlines since a few years and are now naturally reaching the hotel space. Amadeus, as a technology provider for the travel industry, have long developed systems for travel providers addressing these changes and allowing them not only to sustain the traffic pressure but to also innovate in marketing and merchandising with new shopping experiences. This is also true for hoteliers. With Amadeus Hotel Platform – Search Engine, hoteliers can benefit from the latest technology enhancements in search technology. Thanks to intelligent caching techniques, hoteliers no longer worry about the growth of traffic, but more importantly have the opportunity to enhance their guest experience with faster response times, response to multi-criteria request, interactive map searches and single and multi-property availability in calendar views with flexible check-in and check-out dates. Proven results were presented to Hoteliers at HTNG showing response time improvements divided by 10, or 80% of search traffic absorbed without impacting the core CRS application, as well as new shopping features allowing hotels to offer a wide range of responses to guest in combinations not available today. In summary, shopping through on-line channels continues to increase and guests want faster and accurate responses to multi-criteria search. Hotel IT systems are impacted and need to respond with scalability and reliability. Is current hotel technology fit for these changes? Can hoteliers bear the cost to adapt? Solutions exist with proven results: Amadeus Search Engine technology allows protecting against exponential traffic, reducing overall IT costs, enhancing end user experience, and finally opening the door for innovative marketing. About Amadeus Hotel IT Amadeus has served the global hospitality industry for over 20 years, supporting hotels' distribution and technology needs. Amadeus employs over 170 dedicated hotel specialists covering every aspect of development, delivery and support of hospitality technology solutions. Our comprehensive, scalable portfolio of advanced management systems includes: Amadeus Hotel Platform, an above-property single source solution for next generation hotel, reservations and distribution technology focused on single image inventory, single view of the guest and enhanced merchandising. Amadeus also provides revenue management and global distribution systems, including the Amadeus Hotel Platform-Revenue Management. Currently, Amadeus Hotel IT solutions are being
used by 1,500 customers in 35 countries. For more information, please visit www.amadeus.com/hotelit About AmadeusAmadeus is a leading transaction processor and provider of advanced technology solutions for the global travel and tourism industry. Customer groups include travel providers (e.g. airlines, hotels, rail, ferries, etc.), travel sellers (travel agencies and websites), and travel buyers (corporations and individual travellers). The group operates a transaction-based business model and processed 850 million billable travel transactions in 2010. Amadeus has central sites in Madrid (corporate headquarters and marketing), Nice (development) and Erding (Operations – data processing centre) and regional offices in Miami, Buenos Aires, Bangkok and Dubai. At a market level, Amadeus maintains customer operations through 73 local Amadeus Commercial Organisations covering 195 countries. Amadeus is listed on the Madrid, Barcelona, Bilbao and Valencia stock exchanges and trades under the symbol "AMS.MC". For the year ended 31 December 2010, the company reported revenues of EUR 2,683 million and EBITDA of EUR 1,015 million. The Amadeus group employs around 10,000 employees worldwide, with 123 nationalities represented at the central offices. To find out more about Amadeus please go to www.amadeus.com. To visit the Amadeus Investor Relations centre please go to www.investors.amadeus.com |
