Travel Tripper, the New York City-based hotel technology company, is debuting a platform that offers hotels multi-channel websites that are plugged in to a booking engine and a CRS with live rates.
While there are many digital marketing tools out there for hotels, the new TT Web product illustrates some functionality that is representative of the broader industry and e-commerce trends.
Until recently, most boutique and independent hotels have had websites where the central reservation system (CRS) is separate from the hotels website(s). TT Web is different. When an e-commerce manager schedules rates, rules, and schedules in TT Web's, the rates become live at the selected time in the hotel's website(s) -- without needing a parallel process of updating its sites separately.
Steffan Berelowitz, vice president of digital platforms, told Tnooz about some of the solution's signature features. (He has overseen the suite's development since Travel Tripper acquired his cloud-based content management system, Bluetrain.io, a year ago.) Berelowitz said:
"TT Web is one of the first hotel platforms where live rates are native and baked-in. Our hypothesis is that today's customers used to shopping on Amazon and on other online retailers want to see some pricing when they arrive at hotel websites...."
"The customer doesn't have use a site's booking engine to see live rates. The live rates can be available automatically if a hotelier wants them to be....
"E-commerce managers will like the simplicity of uploading information only once. The other audience is the hotel marketer whose job it is to promote and merchandize the properties.... TT Web will spare them from having to chase the tail of ecommerce to make sure all offers are in synch."
The following screenshots illustrate the way this can happen.
Another distinctive feature of TT Web is that it offers hoteliers the option of adding a customer-facing nano-metasearch widget, enabling the customer to feel assured that a hotel's direct rates compare favorably to the rates offered elsewhere.
Its optional price-matching tool, Rate Match, covers about 20 online travel agencies, including brands under Expedia Inc and Priceline Group. Hotels have the option to choose whichever OTAs they want, if any, to appear. The company said, "Best Rate Guarantee information can be displayed on any page of the website showing with tonight's rate (for the property's base room) with OTA rates crossed out."
More than 1,500 hotels are customers of Travel Tripper, and a few hotels using the system live already are the Aleph Hotel in Rome, The Pierre New York, WestHouse Hotel New York, Taj Boston, and 24 North Hotel in Key West.
As motivation to book, visitors will be able to see how many reservations were completed in the last 48 hours, copying a marketing technique first popularized by Booking.com.
TT Web's booking engine RezTrip supports two channel managers, Siteminder and Rate Tiger, at the moment.
Some hoteliers may find TT a cloud-based system like TT Web's to be more flexible than ones run on WordPress, a popular content management system (CMS). Berelowitz refers to many of these older sites as "brochureware" -- static pages that aren't e-commerce systems linked to CRS platforms.
As a cloud-based system based on GitHub, TT Web is automatically upgraded every 2 to 3 weeks, Travel Tripper says. It is available now for implementation by its in-house design agency or through the company's web agency partners.
The product is available to the company's customers worldwide. The company has about 70 employees. In addition to the US, they have an office in the UK and a new office in Hyderabad, India, which currently employs 20 and is anticipated to employ 65 in the near future.