Room for improvement in hotel-operator processes

Hotels and operators need to look at new ways of working so they can help each other to trim costs and save time, according to a new white paper. The paper, prepared by TOWARD Europe’s Travel Supplier to Tour Operator working group, looks at ways of improving hotels’ distribution through operators. In particular it identifies “significant room for improvement” in content management, especially in relation to descriptive data and rate loading. The study says that hotels could make life easier for operators who currently have to collate marketing information from lots of different sources. It reports that “while tour operators are not expecting hotels to supply ready-to-go marketing material, the process would be significantly simplified and streamlined if content could be collected from each hotel based on standard content data definitions.” The paper also identifies room for improvement on the issue of rate loading. It says that most information from hotels has to be loaded manually by the tour operator, with only a limited amount of data supplied electronically. It reports: “Both hotels and tour operators urgently want to improve the level of automation involved in data exchange – the question is how to achieve this?” It concludes that issues that need to be looked at over a long term period include inventory management – particularly the need to load rates into both the hotel CRS and the tour operator reservation system; automating allocation management; and identifying where automation can improve the booking and fulfilment process.