Direct-booking champion TripTease is opening what it hopes will be another weapon in the arsenal of ways to lure business away from online travel agencies.
The launch of Direct Booking Platform: Ilio Edition follows a $9 million capital-raise in April this year, in a Series B round led by BGF Ventures.
The platform works behind the scenes of a hotel's website and manages a number of functions to, it says, "recapture the lost guest relationship".
This comes in the form of handling parity issues across distribution channels, a messaging system between hotel and guest, front-desk tools and price intelligence and benchmarking services.
It says:
"DBP: Ilio makes a hotel website as welcoming as a lobby, and allows the hotelier to showcase their greatest asset: their service."
TripTease estimates hotels are being undercut by online travel agencies "almost 30% of time", with the outcome being an increase in commissions having the effect of eating away at "dwindling profits" of hotels.
Until now, TripTease was probably most famous for its Price Check widget - a tool that would sit on a hotel's website and display the price of a room at the property compared to the rate found on online travel agencies such as Booking.com or Expedia.
The company found itself at odds with the Priceline Group-owned Booking.com in November 2015, with threats of exclusion against hotels if they used the service.
TripTease's last investment round also included Notion Capital and Episode 1 Ventures, both which had backed Triptease's $7 million Series A round in February 2016, and a $2 million pre-Series A the previous year.