How Hotel Distribution Works

Today, guests use both traditional and online portals to book, which means hoteliers are constantly faced with one main challenge: maximizing their hotel distribution strategy in order to get in front of the right customers, at the right time.

Hotel distribution refers to the complicated web of internet-based channels through which guests book rooms with hotels. Guests go through a variety of booking channels depending on their intent, loyalty status, and trip purpose. These channels include:

• Online travel agencies
• Travel management companies
• Tour operators
• Corporate self-booking
• Travel agents
• Hotel websites

From a home-based agency leading online player, our solution puts you in front of all types of booking services all over the world – including high-touch travel management companies, web services customers, and leisure agencies. 

Getting connected has never been easier – if you have a Central Reservation System (CRS), we connect to our Travel Platform directly. Once connected, we help you to sell the right room and the right property, at the right rate, to the right guest, in any market, anywhere.

Gain Access to a Global Footprint: With a GDS, you can connect with the biggest global footprint. That’s millions of potential guests that you might not reach otherwise.

Hotel GDS Optimization: Offers you the opportunity to promote your message to exactly the right target audience to build your brand and grow sales.

Hotel Representation: If you don’t have a CRS or cannot support a GDS-CRS, our hotel representation company -Travelopro is here to help. Travelopro is a multi-GDS services company that distributes your inventory and content to the world’s global distribution systems – Amadeus, Sabre, Travelport (Galileo and Worldspan).

Online Travel Agents and Metasearch

A hotel’s CRS should then connect to the OTAs (online travel agencies) such as Expedia, Booking.com, and Hotels.com. While there are thousands of OTAs, 90 percent of the OTA bookings come through Expedia and Booking.com, so hoteliers should stay focused on those. A good CRS will also connect a hotel to major airline websites such as British Airways and Southwest Airlines.

A special mention here to Metasearch engines, another disruptive channel that lets users compare prices from OTAs and booking sites — all in one place. Some examples of Meta Search are Google Hotel Ads, Trivago, TripAdvisor, and Kayak.

Metasearch sites like Google, Kayak, Skyscanner, and TripAdvisor compare prices across various channels, with Google the most powerful of all—all searches start at Google.

Global Distribution System (GDS)

The traditional go-to guys for corporate and group bookings, who’re nowhere close to losing their grip on the distribution framework of hotels. The likes of Sabre, Amadeus, Pegasus, Galileo, and Worldspan are key operators. Like OTAs, they charge a pass-through fee per booking as well as a participation cost, making it a ‘high-cost’ channel if you’re a small accommodation provider. Plus, there is a consortia cost. Not for everyone, but a must for the medium to large players.

GDS is the reservation tool used by travel agencies and consortia for hotel and other travel service bookings. It powers content and provides pricing, availability, and reservation information to many OTAs. It presents a huge opportunity for our accommodation providers wishing to gain access to the lucrative corporate markets.
 
One of the world’s largest companies dedicated to marketing and connecting independent hoteliers with bookers worldwide. Travelopro puts our partnering venues in front of 500,000 travel agents worldwide and millions more online.

Travelopro takes care of this for you seamlessly, so you don't need to. We have channel manager & GDS connect within our Distribution System, which automatically updates room availability across all your channels, along with your Frontdesk. This way your availability & rates everywhere stay in sync with each other. Your commissions & terms of bookings once set up in the system, get handled automatically by Travelopro.

GDS represents 58 million hotel bookings a year and increases by 5% each year. One-third of the worldwide travel traffic goes via GDS and it represents 20% of hotel distribution revenue. It allows you to vary your distribution and also target new types of clients such as corporations.

We connect you to Amadeus, Sabre, Galileo, and Worldspan, the biggest hotel booking networks. This means your hotel gets access to nearly 5,000 portals and more than 600,000 travel agents around the world. 

Limitless Possibilities with Global Distribution

By choosing Travelopro as your distribution partner and adopting the best hotel distribution software, we remove the guess-work and technology considerations and let you focus on your strategy. We have broken the barrier between property level and central chain distribution once and for all. Whether an independent hotel or global chain, we’ll connect you with any traveler anywhere.

CRS Distribution

Travelopro connects the world’s largest chain hotels to over 1500 channels using advanced switch technology that has evolved since the birth of hotel online distribution channel management. Today we operate at millisecond speeds, giving you the fastest connectivity, the industry has to offer.

Travelopro smart cache technology ensures your CRS maintains optimal performance and protects against excessive shopping from your demand partners. With change hint notification we ensure your channels are always up-to-date with the latest availability, rates, and inventory

Our hotel property will be featured under the Travelopro provider GDS code. And with an easy to use interface of our cloud-based Central Reservation System (CRS) you will be able to quickly update your GDS availability and rates. It also allows you to manage the online hotel reservation system for your hotel website from the same platform.

Our CRS Connects To The Following Distributors:

• All GDS: Amadeus, Worldspan, Sabre, and Galileo
• Travel Consortia: Amex, ABC, BCD, CWT, etc
• Thousands of leisure travel agents
• Corporate Inplant travel buyers and agencies
• 3rd party websites, including Expedia, Travelocity, Booking.com
• Major external booking channels
• Lanyon RFP tool
• Outsource call center services
• Website Booking Engine

GDS provides pricing, availability, and reservation functionality to a world-wide market of consortia, who can book airline, car, hotel, and other travel arrangements for their customers. The four main GDSs are Sabre, Galileo, Amadeus, and Worldspan. The GDS feeds most consortia, providing a major source of business for hotels that capture strong corporate demand. Some of the main international consortia are ABC, BSI, American Express, BCD, CRA, Carlson Wagonlit, Radius, and Thor. 

Travelopro, our hotel distribution channel management software product helps you manage your online distribution in one place. With over 1500+ channels, we connect you with travelers all across the world that help achieve global distribution for hotel inventory. 

Maximize your visibility on global and local OTAs to ensure you attract travelers no matter where they’re shopping. Our intuitive interface helps you manage availability, rates, and inventory without logging into each extranet.

Travelopro’s hotel distribution system connects you with the largest distribution ecosystem in the industry. Whether you’re a hotel needing property level channel management or chain level CRS connectivity, we have a solution to fit your needs. We connect your hotel distribution strategy to revenue with cutting-edge technology and distribution experts from across the industry.

The common pool of inventory avoids overbookings by seamlessly updating each channel in real-time and sends you the notification when a booking is made.