How to access 14 years and four months of experience in milliseconds
What would you give to remove 14 years and four months of hard slog from your current to-do list? That´s how long it would take a hotel sales manager to meet with 60,000 travel seller intermediaries. That is assuming they spent just 30 minutes with each person, worked 8 hours a day five days a week, and had no holidays, sick leave or even comfort breaks. Oh, and instantly transported themselves from meeting to meeting (or relied on Skype, a risky option).
At Hotelbeds Group we have reduced those 14 years and four months of work down to milliseconds by giving hotels access to a giant community of travel sellers globally. And since Tourico Holidays and GTA started their integration into Hotelbeds Group, the number of travel sellers using the platform has increased to over 60,000. Not only is this a big increase from the previous 35,000 customers, but additionally the range of source markets has widened – with greater presence in North America and Asia Pacific.
These 60,000 customers can access hotels via the platform every single second, all day every day. In total these customers make up to 1.5 billion searches a day. Aside from the fact that a hotel sales manager couldn´t really meet 60,000 people and have a 100% success rate, there are other factors that would make it almost impossible: for example they´d need to speak every language and have a super slick (and quick!) contracting process. And that´s assuming their hotel can handle payments in any currency, has a robust inventory platform in place, and so on.
Collectively the total amount of customers connecting to the Group´s bedbank via the wholesale channel – the online travel agencies (OTAs), tour operators, B2B re-sellers (who in turn sell onto other intermediaries), and airlines – now numbers around 7,000. The rest of the over 60,000 customers are made up of travel agents, ranging from one-man-bands right up to some leading chains such as Viajes El Corte Inglés in Spain.
Whilst Tourico Holidays and GTA currently remain independent businesses within Hotelbeds Group, already their integration is well underway. Most relevant from a hotel partner or travel intermediary perspective is that cross selling has already begun. Tourico Holidays and Hotelbeds started in the early autumn; and in December GTA´s hotels also started to become available to the rest of the Group´s brands. With more than 170,000 hotels available on the Group´s bedbank platform, many of them contacted directly, that represents a lot of cross-selling potential.
To read more of the latest news about our integration see yesterdya´s press release (here) about our plans to increase the number of directly contracted hotels by 10,000 over the coming years and how we´ll go about this by recruiting around 200 new professionals in our Yield and Contracting teams globally.
