Italian DMC bookings skyrocket when launching own contracts in GDS

Italian DMC bookings skyrocket when launching own contracts in GDS

In our time a travel business without an online selling channel can easily lose their market share if it doesn’t adapt rapidly. Our brand new client, an Italian DMC saw their business dwindled down when the unique hotels stopped giving him the best rates and started working directly with the major booking OTA websites in Europe. Hundreds of hotels with whom he had been working for years saw an opportunity in trading their share on the online market. Moreover, the offline channels for selling to corporate clients lost priority and the business was going down rapidly.

The major threats of the classical DMCs were and still are the world renowned OTAs that have tremendous budgets available for Marketing and IT Solutions. The OTAs are eating up every year massive chunks of market share across the world and the DMC businesses constantly need to reinvent themselves in order to survive.

Most of the boutique and unique hotels and villas don’t have dedicated IT budgets in order to cover all the costs of a quality software or the huge investments required by a “state-of-art” distribution network. In those cases, the property owners are obliged to sign disadvantageous contracts with major OTAs in order to secure some means of distribution.

One solution for all the problems

The quick fix for our client was to gather his inventory and distribute it online, to align with the trending market. wbe.travel had the fool proof product and the key to clear up their problems – an up-to-date software with multiple services. wbe.travel provided him the complete booking engine with just one connection with one of the largest GDS.

The unique hotels that he had in his portfolio, logged in manually into wbe.travel’s Extranet portal to upload their rates and information. The content was communicated through wbe.travel software and afterwards transmitted via the connection with the multi-GDS service company – Amadeus LinkHotel. The purpose of the GDS was to distribute live products with content, dates and availability in multiple languages to the world’s global distribution systems – Amadeus, Sabre, Travelport (Galileo and Worldspan).

Other hotels used a 16 Chanel Manager technology implemented by wbe.travel in order to automatically push rates into the wbe.travel’s Extranet. wbe.travel combined all of the above and gave an aggregated flow of hotels and villas inside the Amadeus Link Hotel technology platform.

The multi-GDS afterwards distributed the information onto the travel agent partner network for other travel businesses to sell. The multi-GDS system will soon share the properties also in the Tripadvisor hotel booking solution.

How can a software surpass the sales of a major OTA?

The connection through wbe.travel’s booking platform gave our client the possibility to gain immediate bookings. The reservations increased with almost 35% just by using one major Global Distribution Channel into wbe.travel’s system.

Moreover, the hotels received worldwide exposure, an entry door to corporate bookers, live 24/7 access to the inventory and content and the most important it offered them the opportunity to share the part of their rates on other selling channels that were before assigned to the giant booking websites.

The state of art model that wbe.travel implemented stands on a large technological process previously implemented in the booking engine. The major benefit is that it immediately skyrockets the sales of the directly contracted rooms, both in static or dynamic formats of any local DMC company that use it, by extending the inventory to the well-established global GDS platform. Both the DMC and the hotels easily achieve rapid and palpable growth without any additional investments in marketing or sales.

About wbe.travel

wbre.travel gained the trust of more than 50 travel businesses over the last 9 years by delivering the proven success technology, consultancy, technical support, training and constant customer care.

wbe.travel is dedicated to constantly grow and be up-to-date with the trends and the requirements of the constant changing travel market. The talented team of IT professionals is driven by the dedication and passion to overcome modern challenges.

Contact us for a personalized solution for your travel business at sales@wbe.travel