Hoteliers looking to increase direct bookings may get a leg up over online travel agencies through Sabre Hospitality’s Intelligent Retailing platform.
The platform, which the company outlined earlier this year, allows hotels to sell rooms and packages through an attribute-based model, effectively eliminating the need to sell by traditional room types.
Travelers can, for example, build a package that has a room with a pool view on a top floor, combined with a spa deal.
But for hotels that also sell inventory via OTAs, they still need to provide a basic room rate to the intermediaries and abide by rate parity clauses.
That’s where Intelligent Retailing is advantageous in the direct channel, says Clinton Anderson, president of Sabre Hospitality Solutions, because there are no parity clauses around selling ancillaries.
So, a room may be listed for $300 on Booking.com and the hotel's website, but on the hotel's website only, Intelligent Retailing facilitates the selling of add-ons.
Speaking at Sabre Technology Exchange (STX) in Las Vegas this week, Anderson says a similar scenario has already played out in the airline space.
“I think there’s a case to be made – and a strong one – that the traditional definition of room and seat have to be provided in parity in the OTA,” but not in the case of ancillaries.
“The ability to drive incremental revenue, to gain insights about customers and shopping profile data … is going to allow us to deliver a set of products and services in the form of add-ons and unique packages that will not only improve the guest experience for travelers, but drive top-line revenue and bottom-line profitability.”
Sabre is starting the Intelligent Retailing integration in the direct channel, he says, then with the Sabre GDS and eventually with OTAs, as well.
The platform is currently being piloted with Langham Hotels, and the plan is to test and learn over the next two quarters and bring to the broader marketplace in 2020.
Content Services for Lodging
Also at STX, Sabre announced the release of its Content Services for Lodging solution for agents.
In addition to traditional GDS content, Sabre Content Services for Lodging pulls additional property and rate information from the likes of Booking.com, Bedsonline and Expedia Partner Solutions.
The API solution gives travel buyers access to more than one million property options from multiple sources in a single screen, giving them increased flexibility and the ability to better manage preferred content.
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Traci Mercer, senior vice president of lodging, ground and sea for Sabre Travel Network, says the solution came about after Sabre customers from both the supply and demand side asked for more content and functionality.
“We evaluated, and it was obvious that the GDS in terms of lodging distribution had lost share over several years, so we tried to ask ourselves some tough questions: Why did this happen? Is it a financial issue? Is it a content issue? Do we just not have the right hotels? Is it just consumer behavior now going to B2C sites?” she says.
“The reality is, the answer was a little bit of all of them in different elements. That posed a challenge for us as a company.”
To ensure Sabre was meeting its customers’ needs, it formed a partner advisory board to address key concerns and work on a solution to “not look at what was done in the past, but what can be done completely different in the future,” Mercer says.
“Historically, I’ve never seen a GDS solve problems like this; I’ve never seen an advisory board.”
In a usability study, Sabre saw that product normalization helped agents reach a booking decision 30% faster.
The Content Services for Lodging API will soon be incorporated across all Sabre points of sale, including Sabre Red 360 and GetThere. Additional enhancements to the product will be added in 2020.
* This reporter's attendance at the event was supported by Sabre.