Pedro Camara's Top 3 trends in Online Hotel Distribution
Posted by Content
As a pioneer in the B2B connectivity marketplace arena, Pedro Camara, CEO TravelgateX, is often asked for his thoughts on the evolution of hotel distribution, specially now during these turbulent times. Here are the top three trends Pedro has identified for 2021:
Automation of the entire customer journey: scaling without sacrificing
Needless to say travel companies have been heavily affected by Covid-19 and inefficiencies once masked by using "brute force", i.e. hiring tons of people, have become a real issue because there’s no money to hire anymore, so processes that have always been manual must be automated. This issue affects a company as a whole, from sales to support, onboarding to billing, each and every step of the customer journey must be automated, so companies can stay in business. A typical example of this is the automation of customer service. There are many companies offering bots that claim to minimize the manual effort of solving customers’ problems. We, at TravelgateX, have implemented many automations during 2020 and the results are very positive - today, we’re solving tickets quicker than ever.
Solutions that streamline the distribution process
The effort of bringing the end-customer closer to the hotelier has many reasons and some interesting solutions tacking it from different angles. Google's free hotel links as reported last week is an example, as is our own initiative, TGX-Direct, where we connect hotels directly with OTAs without a need of a contract between the 2 parties. It also solves the problem of credit by relying on emerging payments technology such as VCCs or wallet-to-wallet solutions in order to secure the payment.
Data, Data, Data
The world's going mad for data - from using it to improve the workplace for women to our own experiment in matching the Partners in our Network by using real data from the transactions taken place in the marketplace, the sky is the limit to what we can achieve with good data! We believe we can better serve our Partners’ network by using data to generate more business and make it more efficient. At the end of the day, this will translate to more and cheaper travelling options for the end customer.