25 Oct Update on using external hotel suppliers in Sell-It Suite

Managing and Selling From Hotel Suppliers

Brochure Content Management

Most hotel bed bank providers prefer to deliver brochure content i.e. hotel descriptions and images in a bulk format rather than in real-time over their supplier interface. This is then updated at regular intervals, again in a bulk format. Whilst this is easier for the bed bank providers, it does potentially create more work for the travel company who is selling via the bed bank. Sell-It Suite supports the loading and management of brochure content from hotel bed banks such as GTA and Hotelbeds. The bulk content is received in whichever format it is delivered by the bed bank provider.

For example, GTA delivers its content in many zip files. The content is then extracted by a system process and imported into our GTA database. We hold separate databases for each hotel bed bank containing all of their brochure content. A Sell-It Suite user is able to specify in the Inventory Manger which hotels they wish to sell via GTA. This may be all of the GTA hotels or just a subset e.g. only specific resorts or only certain hotels in a specified resort. We provide an import process within Inventory Manger which imports the brochure content from each hotel bed bank database for all of the hotels that are to be sold. This means that the brochure content for each hotel a travel company wishes to sell is available within our system and can be used both in the brochure content part of the company’s web site and during the booking journey. We are also able to support and manage different language version of the same hotel content within our system.

Sell-It Suite is also able to report on changes to brochure content when it is updated by the hotel bed bank. Each time new content is received from e.g. Hotelbeds, the new content is compared against the version stored in Sell-It’s database and we present a list of the changes identified. A travel companies Product Manager then has the choice of accepting the changes or not.

Resort and City Mapping

Each hotel bed bank has its own resort/city codes. There are no common codes across hotel bed bank providers. In fact, the problem is more complex than this as a hotel bed bank may split a city such as Paris up into a number of smaller regions e.g. Paris, Paris-Massy, Paris Orly, Paris_Orsay etc. GTA, for example, has 31 city codes for the Paris area while Hotelbeds has 1! Within Sell-It you can specify which city codes you want to use in e.g. GTA when searching for accommodation in “Paris”. This ensures that your customers are presented with the right list of hotels for a specific city when they search for availability on the web.

Hotel Mapping

Some hotel bed banks have the same hotel loaded multiple times under different hotel codes in order to represent the different room types in that hotel. Sell-It Suite is able to map all these different hotel codes into ONE code in our system. This means that, within our system, you can issue ONE request for hotel availability and Sell-It will automatically handle the fact that this needs to be converted into multiple requests e.g. for GTA. The resultant multiple responses will again, all be mapped back into a SINGLE response within our system.