BBT talks to Jeff Edwards, Amadeus’ head of global hotel business, about the latest technology developments and their impact on travel buyers
What’s on the horizon for mobile tools?
I think it will be the personal experience of travel – having my entire travel adventure on a single device which I can change and update on the fly. That sort of all-encompassing entertainment travel experience on a single device is the goal.
We need to be cognisant of the drive from a consumer point of view. And frankly, it doesn’t matter who made the booking, as long as that person feels that ‘this is a unique trip, done for me, tailored to my needs, and it’s accessible any time I want’.
On the business side, we’re seeing more B2B and B2E (business to employee) applications being run on mobile devices, so mobile is by no means restricted to consumer usage.
How can the “personalisation” of travel booking dovetail with buyers’ aims of driving policy compliance, good MI reporting and traveller tracking?
Bookings can be made directly by a leisure traveller on the hotel chain system, or managed by professional travel agencies making sure corporate travel policy compliance is enforced.
Both booking paths should happily co-exist, to the benefit of all parties. Behind the scenes, the challenge is how to get this booking data into a format where it can be easily accessed from a single system, updated, and securely passed along the pipeline without getting bogged down by all the intermediaries.
Hotels are focusing on driving more sales via their own websites. How does this affect corporate travel buying?
Corporate travel buyers need content. Whether this comes from a distribution channel or direct from the hotel is not material. The question is: what are hotels doing to attract corporate buyers to their websites? Corporate travel buyers need immediate, accurate access to hotels’ content.
Integrated access to this content is the ideal – ie: being able to access it from within the system you already use to run your whole business. A lot of buyers are reluctant to search external content – but the thing is, buyers can still access hotel website content from within their system, provided the system collects data from hotel providers. For hoteliers, this is good news as it means they don’t lose out on corporate bookings.
Hotel brands say they are doing this because of the prohibitive costs of distributing via other channels – what’s your view on this?
All the players in the travel scene are eager to reduce costs. No company likes to overpay or dedicate resources and time to performing tasks that do not add value to the travel process. Amadeus provides hotel brands and corporate travel sellers with content and technology to meet the needs of their customers, and fulfills a role in the travel process by enabling professional corporate travel agencies to save millions to corporations.
One concern has been that smaller and independent properties miss out, because they often feel they can’t afford to manage multiple distribution channels. This means bookers are missing out on valuable content. Our way around this problem is Amadeus Linkhotel, which acts as the perfect technology ‘engine room’ for channel distribution functions. Smaller hoteliers have access to solutions that are modular and scalable, and can be upgraded at any time to suit requirements. We want to ensure smaller and independent hoteliers are not priced out of the system.
Room allocation – what progress is being made towards guests being able to choose a specific room in a hotel at the time of booking?
There is no reason why travellers shouldn’t be able to select their exact room at booking time. In the aviation industry, this has always been easier as aircraft types are homogeneous (albeit with subtle differences) across any airline fleet across the world. For hotels, it’s a slightly different exercise. Except in the US, each property is very different, and mapping thousands of different hotel rooms globally requires a massive effort. There are, of course, ways to simplify this process, and I am sure we will start to see these features automated and web-based very soon.