Anyone wondering why Travelportbought Asia-Pacific metasearch engineSprice last year will soon understand - the technology is to power a new hotel search system.
Due for release most likely in the third quarter of 2011, the existing Travelport Leisure system for travel agents will be replaced with a new service aimed at both leisure and corporates, but crucially with a massive increase in the number of properties available for booking.
Travelport Leisure only relaunched from a previous, GTA-only system in June last year to feature stock from more providers, but a decision to overhaul again is being driven by new group vice president, global hospitality and partner marketing, Niklas Andréen, as the company looks to massively boost its credentials in the agent hotel booking sector.
The Travelport GDS supplies around 95,000 hotels to the current system, but the new, as yet unnamed portal is expected to have around 300,000 properties made available for booking by way of the addition of over 200,000 from a variety of pre-paid hotel stock aggregators.
One such supplier will probably be GTA (soon to be owned by Kuoni, itself a supplier to the new platform), but decision to acquire Singapore-based Sprice is starting to unravel after many a curious onlooker pondered why the consumer-focused site was snapped up by Travelport in May 2010.
The new system will continue to be "GDS agnostic", meaning that it will be available to agents of any persuasion for their air search and shopping.
Andréen says the technology behind Sprice is being integrated into the new agent portal and was a major reason for the purchase last year ("knowledge and expertise in search", he says).
"We believe that if we can take the search principles behind meta and marry it with our knowledge of agents and booking then we will have a fantastic system".
Such is the focus on the hospitality division under Andréen that he is predicting a doubling of headcount to around 90 by the end of the year.
Travelport is also planning to include the new hotel system within the Universal API for online travel agencies. Existing providers on the Leisure system such as TUI for car hire and Hostelworld for budget accommodation are expected to remain in the new service.