The lodging leap – our journey to overcome hotel content fragmentation

There is no doubt that the biggest buzzword of the travel industry over the last years has been NDC. It is on everybody’s mind as it is evolving the massive air distribution landscape, where new content is being created and new distribution strategies are being explored. But actually, the essence of NDC – a new distribution capability – in some ways follows in the footsteps of the hotel industry.  And fortunately, our years of experience in managing fragmented content in the hotel space has given us at Amadeus a lot of practice addressing some of the challenges that arise in the wake of this.  

Multiple content sources can lead to greater content fragmentation . This is something the hotel industry has lived for many years. And the main challenge is how to aggregate all the content and make it easy for travel sellers, including business travel agencies , to shop and compare. 

So, what are we doing to bring all the hotel content together?

Already back in 2013, Amadeus launched a scalable multi-source hotel platform that enabled us to bring in content regardless of its source. In the years that have passed since, we have been distributing hotel content from a continuously growing number of different sources - hotel chains and individual properties directly and a large number of global and local aggregators and bed banks. Among them you find Booking.com, Expedia Partner Solutions, HotelBeds and others. In fact, you now have over 1 million unique hotel properties at your fingertips - and the number of sources and options keeps growing! 

Yet, for bringing true value to travel agencies and travelers, providing content from a number of sources is only half the story. Our ultimate goal is to provide our travel sellers access to the best content in the most efficient way. That turns it into not only a question about content quantity, but also content quality. In the context of selling hotels, that means having access to the right properties for your customers (so you do need plenty to choose from), along with full room descriptions (in several languages) and rich media. This is crucial to have clear information about the different accommodation options available, so travelers and travel consultants can make informed decisions and create the best travel experiences.

Our guiding principle – more choice, more reward

And then, the pivotal point is to bring all of this rich content together, and to present it in an integrated way, so that travel agents get an efficient process for sorting through all the options, finding the optimum solution for their customers.

With a lot of advanced technology behind the scenes, we harmonize the hotel descriptions, room type descriptions and many more attributes to make the accommodation offerings comparable. So that whilst a property is presented only once in your display to improve the user experience, it allows you from a single screen to compare rates, earnings, meal plans and cancellation policies across the multiple providers to see which choice provides the greatest reward for you and your customers. This centralized shopping window with a streamlined booking process across the providers, enables our agents to excel in customer servicing and providing vast choice without compromising productivity.

We’re making all of this hotel content available through the Amadeus Travel Platform , the backbone to all of our travel agency solutions, including Amadeus Selling Platform Connect and Web Services – so that all of this content is available for you through whatever channel you prefer. 

Build - succeed - repeat

And now, just like we added all these new distribution capabilities for hotels and accommodation content in the one platform for our agencies, we are doing the same for airline content, following our strategy of “Any content, from any source, through any channel”. This way, we’ll have all the travel content you need, from multiples sources, in the one platform so you can serve your customers the best.