The impact of meta search engines and OTAs on hotel technology

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?

Lire la suite : http://www.hospitalitynet.org/news//4053993.html

Source : Hospitality net, From Amadeus Newsletter