Olset, a hotel booking recommendation startup, is integrating its service with Amadeus CheckMyTrip, an itinerary management solution that give travelers who sign up, or those with an Amadeus reservation, access to their real-time reservation details.
Later this year, if you are a traveler who hasn't booked a hotel yet, the Olset-powered solution will provide you with personalized hotel recommendations and let you complete a hotel booking within the CheckMyTrip mobile interface.
On average, hundreds of thousands of itineraries are forwarded into the CheckMyTrip platform and are being tracked every month -- many of which begin only as flight reservations. So the opportunity for boosting conversions is substantial.
Amadeus states that more than 3 million monthly users access CheckMyTrip on average. But that figure is overall, and doesn't break out mobile activity.
CheckMyTrip can give a traveler contextual notifications, such as if their flights are delayed or their boarding gate changes. For corporate travelers, it can also indicate that you need your travel manager to provide some duty of care.
At this time, Olset is not implementing corporate policies into its CheckMyTrip integration, though the company has the ability to do that. For this first version, it recommends hotels based on user preferences and past behavior.
In the past 2 years, Olset was focused on providing personalization solutions to online travel agencies and TMCs. As described above, the company is now expanding its offerings to additional traveler segments.
Gadi Bashvitz, CEO of Olset, said in an interview:
"Typically what we see is there are three types of corporate travel entities. One is large corporations, those that spend more than $1 million on T&E a year. They have very structured travel programs. These types of corporations will almost always work with a travel management company, or TMC -- with rare exceptions like Google.
The second type of corporation has a midrange T&E spend and typically a less rigorous travel program, with preferred hotels in a few cities where they have major offices. They will also work with TMCs in most cases and rely on the TMC to have preferred properties or chains.
The last type of company is typically a SMB which doesn't have a managed travel program.
For the first two types of corporations, Olset offers its Information as a Service (IaaS) APIs and algorithms to TMCs, to help them boost hotel attach rates.
Let's not forget that even a company that has a rigorous travel program may typically see only a 30% hotel attachment rate, with as many as 50% of travelers booking hotels outside of the program.
Olset's belief is that if you want to improve conversion within the program, you need to show people the right hotels for them at the top of the list, and provide an explanation for why these hotels are a good fit for the traveler.
We want to get to a point where the top three options are hotels that are both within policy and are a good match for the traveler based on their preferences.
Revisiting the CheckMyTrip discussion, initially corporate policies are not included in the recommendations, but over time they could be added. This is a potential win-win for corporate travelers needing to make a quick, relevant booking via mobile and TMCs needing to encourage compliance.
CheckMyTrip could take those guidelines that, say, you shouldn’t spend more than $300 a night unless going to New York City or San Francisco, and it could take into account a user's loyalty membership information, or other factors that are important to the traveler, such as fitness or entertainment facilities."
New product Cinch
Olset is also aiming to serve the unmanaged business traveler. It is launching a separate product from what's mentioned above called Cinch this autumn.
Cinch is an iOS app specifically focused on repeat travel. Bashvitz says that Olset has learned a lot from its work with travel providers and has improved its travel data about clustering and that its basic recommender system from a year ago is much more robust.
The new Cinch service will offer between 3 and 5 recommendations based on how much the company knows about the traveler. The more it knows about the traveler, the more confident it'll be about giving the right recommendation and it will provide fewer recommendations over time. Bashvitz says:
"If we know you’ve flown to Dallas 5 times in last year, have taken similar flights every time, and stayed at the same property, Cinch will give you only one recommendation as long as it meets your preferences and falls into the correct budget."
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