Travelport Ireland has launched a new hotel booking engine, Travelport Rooms and More, which aggregates bedbanks and GDS hotel content. It is free of charge and any agent – whether Travelport customer or not – can sign up for it.
“This is something that agents have been crying out for!” said Dave Walsh, Country Manager. “Agents have been telling us they spend a lot of time searching for the best rates via GDS and various bedbanks. This tool speeds up this process and provides security, time and cost efficiencies.
“We are currently discussing content with key Irish providers and will be adding more in the coming months. Importantly non-Travelport agents can also sign up to use the tool, so it is available to all Irish agents immediately.”
Recent Euromonitor estimates predict that the value of global hotel bookings will reach US$545billion in 2015, demonstrating a compound annual growth rate of 5.9% between 2010 and 2015.
Travelport Rooms and More combines the consumer insights, metasearch functionality and user interface developed by Sprice.com (which was acquired by Travelport in May 2010) withTravelport’s core B2B expertise, to deliver a completely integrated hotel-booking platform. Key benefits for users include comparison shopping across multiple providers and the ability to book and cancel hotel bookings in the same tool.
As well as its extensive GDS hotel content (available to Travelport GDS subscribers), Travelport has also signed new agreements with over 20 hotel aggregators and OTAs, including Bedsonline, Transhotel, LateRooms.com and Lowcostbeds. In total, over 200,000 hotel properties will be available to book, often with multiple options available on the same property, giving the travel agent complete transparency and the opportunity to select their preferred provider. Travelport Rooms and More also includes hotel reviews and images, as well as rental car content provided by TUI Cars.
Niklas Andréen, Travelport’s Group Vice-President, Global Hospitality, said that new content would continue to be added post-launch and estimated that there could be asmany as 50 aggregators signed up by the end of the year.
“Our leisure-focused travel agency customers told us they were spending far too much time searching for content across numerous hotel booking solutions and websites and then struggling with inefficient booking processes,” he added. “The case for developing Travelport Rooms and More was a strong one – it complements our GDS hotel offering and provides leisure and mixed travel agencies with extensive new and varied hospitality content and a new highly efficient booking engine.”
