One of the challenges facing the travel industry is the lack of a global standard for hotel content distribution. Each provider focuses on its own set of standards when distributing content and this can lead to duplication, conflicts, as well as investment of resources and time during one of the key phases of a collaboration, the mapping process.
In this situation, TravelgateX's product and development teams have worked on preparing an API that allows buyers to map rooms by description instead of codes. This means that the new feature will normalise all signs, punctuation, accents and whitespace to unify descriptions. For example, if there are two descriptions of "Double suite, with jacuzzi!", and "Double suite with jacuzzi" it will be normalised to "double suite with jacuzzi", and that is what the marketplace database will store.
The product team says that "mapping by room description rather than by room code makes more sense these days, so we have worked to offer this feature to our partners".
Many of the suppliers generate different codes for the same RoomType, as each of them contains a specific feature. This means that Buyers have to map each code, even though many refer to the same RoomType, investing time and resources to have the Portfolio up to date and all options mapped and available. But now, thanks to the new solution, when mapping by RoomDescription, many of the codes generated for that same Roomtype would already be mapped by Description, so if a Seller later generates new codes, the mapping would already be available immediately.
In short, the mapping of rooms by description will allow for a more efficient and optimised management of the thousands of transactions that take place every day on the TravelgateX marketplace.
For further information, the team has left a comprehensive description on the TravelgateX Community.