Amadeus building a “Google Hotel Finder” for travel agents

January 20, 2012 | Hotel Marketing

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The distribution of HRS' hotel content through Amadeus is just the beginning of Amadeus' "multi-source" hotel distribution initiative, giving agents easy access to hotels from different sources from a single screen. Meanwhile, HRS is capitalizing on the new deal and is increasing its distribution cost to 15% for all hotels.

By Markus Busch, Editor Hotelmarketing.com

According to Hugo Ehrnreich, Head of Hotel Distribution for Amadeus, the company is already negotiating with two to five other OTAs to integrate their hotel content into Amadeus' distribution system.

The new hotel content will be available via both Amadeus e-Travel Management – the online self-booking tool used by 5,200 corporations worldwide – and Amadeus Selling Platform – the point of sale solution used by Amadeus travel agents for traditional servicing.

Both systems feature graphical user interfaces and Amadeus’ newly re-engineered hotel search and reservation system, which similar to Google Hotel Finder allows agents to click on a hotel listing and view its multiple offers from different sources.

Yet, Amadeus confirms that the majority of its users - the ones using the non graphical traditional GDS screens - will have no access to the new hotel offers, and will continue to book hotels on Amadeus' regular legacy hotel content.

However, Ehrnreich notes that the strong trend to self-booking tools in corporations increases demand for the new graphical user interfaces not only from corporations but also their travel agents, who need to have access to the same screens as their customers to effectively service them.

Amadeus is not the only GDS currently enhancing its hotel product with multi-source offerings. Travelport's "Rooms and More" pursues a similar strategy by making hotel content from Expedia, Booking.com and the likes available on its "Universal Desktop" product, a graphical user interface currently used by some 6000+ travel agents.

HRS increases hotel commission to 15%, offers no opt-out option

Just a day after the announcement of its new distribution alliance with Amadeus, HRS send a note to all hotel partners announcing a commission increase from 13% to 15% effective March 1, 2012.

HRS justifies the commission raise with increased costs based on the expansion of its distribution network including the acquisition of Hotel.de, new offices in Moscow and Singapore, and its new partnership with Amadeus.

Not only are hotels left with accepting the commission increase, there is also no option to opt-out of the various onward distribution channels - like Amadeus - that HRS has signed. The company says, a partnership with HRS automatically entitles it to distribute a hotel's content to all its connected channels.

In the case of GDS distribution, this can become an expensive undertaking especially for high-performing GDS hotels and may cannibalize their low transaction based fees which they normally managed to contract with their GDS service providers.

HRS further clarified a quote in the original press release for the Amadeus distribution alliance where it reads "50'000 independent hotel properties which were distributed exclusively through HRS up to now." As expected, these hotels don't distribute exclusively via HRS, they are just currently not distributed in the GDS. In other words, new hotel content for Amadeus. That's why these hotels will also find their way into the hotel database of the legacy system, and will be bookable both via Amadeus' cryptic and graphical user interfaces.

Read also "Amadeus and HRS enter strategic hotel distribution alliance", and "OTAs battle for GDS travel agent visibility."