roomsXML has begun a release of one of the most ambitious hotel technology upgrades as it tackles the inconsistency of hotel room naming conventions.
roomsXML has released a video of real conversations between travel agents and their pax.
Mark Luckey, MD roomsXML Asia Pacific says:
“In many cases, the hotel marketing department calls the room one thing on the hotel website whilst their wholesale department calls it something else.”
“Agents told us their pax were researching hotels online, calling to get prices and the agents couldn’t confirm if the rooms they saw were the same as the ones on the hotel website. It meant that sometimes sales opportunities were lost or extra time was needed to clarify.
“Our global network of travel agents listed this as the most challenging aspect of booking hotels online. … it was creating more work for everyone as they all called a room something different and it just wasn’t good for business.”
roomsXML pioneered hotel de-duplication – the practice of manually filtering aggregated search results ensuring that each hotel only shows once, making it easier to compare prices across properties. This involved unique coding solutions with some lateral thinking.
But as Luckey explains, undertaking the same sort of effort with room names was a whole new level.
“It was one thing to ‘realise’ the value in doing this but another altogether to work out how to do it. Multiple room types across tens of thousands of properties, it’s just massive”
Mark Luckey, MD roomsXML Asia Pacific
“Anuj Bang, who designed and initiated the processes for cleaning up room names, has had a lot of headaches to contend with!
“Most of the work is manual – a team under Anuj’s guidance have spent over 10,000 hours checking websites, emailing hotels, calling hotels, making phantom enquiries, clarifying what they saw.
“The whole team should be proud; it’s been a massive undertaking, not yet complete, but is a clear point of difference for travel agents looking to book online accommodation with confidence.