This is a roundup of product news and announcements for travel systems in tourism and hospitality for January 2017.
Monday 30 January 2017:
TravelClick and Hilton extend partnership
- The hotel chain will use three tools from TraveClick - Demand360, Rate360 and Agency360 - across the entire portfolio of brands and properties. Hotels can use the suite to optimise distribution channels, manage revenue services and access business intelligence data.
Wednesday 25 January 2017:Concur drives Groundscope deal
- The ground transportation provider will give small and medium-sized businesses using the Concur platform for expense management, access to its roster of services. Groundscope has services from 600 local suppliers worldwide and runs via both desktop and mobile apps.
Tuesday 24 January 2017:Hanger 51 picks startups
- The International Airlines Group-backed startup accelerator will work with four new businesses (after evaluating 450 entries): Esplorio, Resolver, VCHain Tech and Warwick Analytics. The quartet will spend ten weeks at the group's airlines (British Airways, Iberia et al) to trial their products and obtain mentoring from senior executives and external experts.
Rambus Ecebs develops mobile ticketing tool
- The Scotland-based IT provider has created a Host Card Emulation platform so that transportation companies can load smart cards onto consumer devices for travel. The app includes an interface to purchase, fulfil and manage tickets, as well as giving operators analytics of behaviour and usage.
BookingKit unites with
MyDays- The partnership allows MyDays's event partners to link to BookingKit's booking and management platform for activities. In return, BookingKit customers will be able to use MyDays to expand their distribution network into the gift service for things-to-do.
Thursday 19 January 2017:Booking.com overhauls payment platform
- The global hotel booking giant is using Ingenico ePayments to help its ongoing strategy to accept more payments directly on the site, rather than solely acting as a reservation service. Ingenico already works with other brands in the Priceline Group stable.
Ideas renews
Sokos- The Finnish hotel chain has worked with Ideas for the last eight years and is now expanding the agreement to include the G3 Revenue Management System across its portfolio of properties. In the group, 29 will transition from the existing platform and 11 will use an automated service for the first time.
Hotelbeds Group shifts data centre
- Hotelbeds Group is on track to complete the move of its IT infrastructure to several of BT’s data processing centres in Madrid by June this year, as it looks to become an entirely cloud-based business within three years. It says the cloud allows it to respond more quickly to the 430 million daily requests it gets, while providing capacity for the business to scale in a cost-efficient way.
Monday 16 January 2017:JacTravel taps DataArt for tech merger
- The data consolidation work follows the acquisition of TotalStay by JacTravel, essentially merging two reservation platforms. The integration included a de-duping process and pulling two large inventories into a single platform.
Tuesday 10 January 2017:OpenKey links up with Preferred Hotels
- Mobile room key provider OpenKey has signed an exclusive partnership deal with Preferred Hotels & Resorts, the largest independent hotel chain with 650 properties across 85 countries. The OpenKey allows hotel owners to control guest room access remotely while allowing guests to open their rooms using their smartphone.(See OpenKey's Tnooz Startup Pitch here)
Tavisca helps out
Tripcon- Japanese hotel metasearch site Tripcon has signed a deal with Tavisca and will use its clarifi product. Clarifi is patent-pending tool which claims to be world’s first real-time hotel mapping and descriptive content delivery system, helping metas and others to de-duplicate inventory. Tripcon meanwhile claims to be the first Japanese travel site to offer "natural phrase search" option.
Monday 9 January 2017:Tropic Air on TTI platform
- The Belize-based carrier will use TTI's Zenith PSS platform to manage its departure control, inventory management, sales, fares and onward distribution of tickets to the main GDSs. Tropic Air flies to 19 destinations in Belize, Mexico and Guatemala.
Yatra allows UPI transactions
- The India-based online travel agency will now accept Unified Payment Interface as a fulfilment method for all products and services. Customers with a Virtual Payment Address can pay for services using the UPI flow platform. The UPI system was integrated through a deal with ICICI Bank.
Friday 6 January 2017:VIA introduces cash-on-delivery system
- The online travel agency will now allow travellers to make a booking for a flight and then pay in cash at any Al-Ansari Exchange in the UAE. The system was introduced to reassure residents that are still nervous about making card payments online.
Wednesday 4 January 2017:HotelRez lands Cubilis deal
- The XML connection between the two hotel tech platforms will allow hotel customers to distribute real-time rates and inventory to travel agencies via GDSs and online travel agencies. HotelRez will also give Cubilis clients access to its corporate and meetings business.
NB: Travel devices image via Shutterstock.