AccorHotels is linking up with Misterfly to provide a "hotel + flight" packaging option to its website, starting in France but with other source markets on the agenda, including the UK.
Misterfly, which secured €20 milion in funding last June, gets its flights from a variety of sources. Its president and founder Nicolas Brumelot told Tnooz that the flights were a mix of Travelport and Sabre, direct connects and bespoke API links to airlines and aggregator inventory.
Its packaging engine, which is powering the Accor offer, is built in partnership with French travel tech firm Orchestra.
Brumelot said that Misterfly was "starting the process" required for it to be able to sell hotel + flight packages from Accor's UK web site - namely getting an ATOL in order to fulfil the regulatory requirements around consumer protection.
France is Misterfly's main market, where it has a consumer-facing web site selling flights and hotels separately. In 2016 it handled 367,000 passengers generating sales of €111 million. But it has recently launched in Spain and is on the verge of going live in Belgium.
It also has a B2B business, making its flights inventory available to travel agents while white-labelling its packaging and booking engine to businesses such as French private sales site Vente-Privee. Brumelot said that, while the revenues were not as strong as B2C, the B2B operations allowed it to "offer more value to airline and hotel suppliers by giving them access via a single contact to more end-users.
"We don't want to be seen as just an OTA. We are an intermediary, but we have to offer the suppliers something more than just B2C because otherwise there is no reason for them to work with us seeing as the airlines are so focussed on direct sales themselves."
From a AccorHotels perspective, hotel + flight is the latest move to reposition its brand dotcom as "the first point of contact between travellers and the AccorHotels network."
The prices are presented to the consumer for the trip rather than as a components. Initially the options are limited to 180 hotels in 30 countries. Members of its Le Club Accor Hotels loyalty scheme will earn points on the hotel portion of the package. In time the entire trip will earn points.
Accor's creation of a hotel + flight option comes a few months after Marriott launched "Vacations by Marriott". Marriott uses Expedia's dynamic packaging engine to power the brand, which also generates a single price for consumers. Vacations by Marriott has a dedicated URL and accesses international flight inventory.
The ability of OTAs to bundle flights and hotels and other components in the early days of ecommerce eventually gave rise to the development of airline holidays brands.
The moves by Marriott and now Accor show that hotels too can strike partnerships with technology providers and create a package holiday option of which they are in control, complicating the competitive distribution landscape. As well as the many and varied options for room-only sales, Accor and Marriott (and by extension other hotel chains to come) are now selling their rooms as part of package on their brand dotcom, as part of a package with OTAs, or as part of a package with an airline. Some even still sell via traditional tour operator brands.
The lines are increasingly blurred between what and how OTAs, hotels and airlines differentiate their online points of sale, while the balance of power between supplier brand dotcoms and third party distributors continues to evolve.