Room Mapping, the modern tool for visible growth in sales

Room Mapping – wbe.travel’s dedication to increase productivity

In our continuous efforts to help our clients grow their sales, we uninterruptedly search for the best solutions, to increase productivity with low to minimum efforts and investment. It’s already been a full month since wbe.travel finished the Room Type Mapping implementation process with its selected partner GIATA. During this time the wbe.travel team extensively tested the functionalities, to have it all set and ready for launch.

We are now delighted to announce that Room Type Mapping is live, working flawlessly and ready to be implemented into your booking systems.

Before we explain each benefit of using the Room Type Mapping let’s try and understand how it works and how it has proven to be efficient in boosting sales.

GIATA Room Type Mapping

When presenting the vast number of hotel search results on your booking platform, the best room offers don’t just show up first. Maybe you decided to always initially present the lowest-priced provider’s results, or you simply display all available rooms and rates to your customers, leaving them with an inconsistent bulk of room type names and descriptions – a chaotic listing!

A dynamic solution for a dynamic environment

To solve this problem, GIATA intensively followed market research and data analysis, tested different approaches, to be able to uniquely identify room categories across multiple providers and learned that room type information is too inconsistent and dynamic to get a reasonable result by applying common software matching processes. So they’ve built a dynamic solution – “GIATA Room Type Mapping”.

Room Type Mapping is the new solution that matches and groups all inconsistent travel information and data, in order for travel companies to present bookable travel products in an easy to understand and consistent language.

By the end of 2019 when GIATA announced it, wbe.travel chose to adopt it, following several verified successful implementations of the market-leading hotel mapping service MultiCodes and the Hotel-ID mapping solution.

The key for higher value sales

The global travel booking abandonment rate averages 90 % for 2019 while for the same timeline, the general rate of online shopping cart abandonment was recorded at 69%. In fact, the average conversion rate for travel platforms is lower compared to other industries, from 4% in travel to 10% for financial or media companies. So what can we do to improve those numbers?

By adopting the newest Room Mapping solution, you can visibly maximize your sales performance. GIATA RTM has been proven to deliver to its clients a 7.1 % increase in conversions, more than 20% growth in margins and an additional 24% of the overall booking revenue.

How does GIATA Room Mapping work in wbe.travel’s system?

Below you can see a screenshot of a simple search of a hotel room in wbe.travel’s B2B Booking Platform, presented in two scenarios: the first image shows a large list of rooms with seven different names and prices, all from different suppliers. In the second image, the Room Type Mapping elegantly grouped the rooms under three precise names, with clear differences and price options, to present a more relevant range of offers, optimized for selling potential.

Room Type Mapping is accessed via a highly performant API where supplier room names are categorized, grouped and standardized using the following key attributes:

• Room Type
• Class
• View
• Features (e.g. Balcony)
• Bed Type
• Number of Bedrooms

Multiple travel suppliers, hundreds of different room names

In wbe.travel’s system GIATA’s Room Type Mapping works across multiple inventory sources from GDSs, Bed Banks, Wholesalers, DMCs and many more. RTM enables your travel agents, corporate and travelers to make comparisons across inconsistently named room types from multiple suppliers and provides clarity to your customer on a wider set of options including room type and best available price.

When and where you use it? Your choice.

In wbe.travel’s system you can choose whether you activate RTM or not. Moreover, you have the option to totally turn it on or partially use it, meaning that within the search results you can have the mapped room whereas in the voucher or in the reservation details you can still have the original supplier’s room name.

Fast and accurate results

Time is crucial. Whether it is the final traveler or your travel agent that browses in your system to search for the ideal room, the response time should be instantaneous. This vital element is driven by your technology provider and subsequently by API connectivity, content and so on.

wbe.travel offers one of the fastest response times in the market, even when browsing through dozens of API travel suppliers. With a combination of wbe.travel’s system and GIATA’s room type mapping, you can offer your clients fast search results but in a clear and organized manner, even with large data volumes.

Easier to find the right room for your customers no matter the property type

Since all travel trends are showing an increasing interest of the modern traveler to book diverse accommodations such as villas, bungalows, yurts and so on, it is crucial for your booking engine to have them all. But more importantly, it is imperative for the traveler to easily find them within the first few seconds of their search. The solution maps all types of accommodation rooms for you to supply the best room offers thereby allowing your customers to create bespoke experiences.

The tool covers all property types and suppliers as it is powered by an algorithm underpinned by a dictionary that is constantly updated, as new room names are discovered. The emphasis of this solution is to focus only on the elements which describe the room and to ignore anything considered to be a rate modifier (e.g. board basis or cancellation conditions).

Enhanced user experience

The basic objective of creating amazing UX is to retain the customer on your website and loyalize him. By offering organized information and less crowded content you improve the overall journey of the user by minimizing their time spent on your platform, so you get a higher look to book ratio.

Moreover, a chaotic list of dozens of rooms enumerated one after another, with several similar names and different prices will only create more confusion. The user will experience a bad overall journey and is likely to immediately leave your booking site, in search of a more easily understandable one. Think about the 7 major factors that describe a great UX. The first ones that came to our mind are: findable, accessible, credible.

This is the best way to offer your clients what they truly desire when browsing. That experience then influences a guest’s decision to book or not, and whether or not to return to your platform. So choose wisely.

Why we trust GIATA?

We chose GIATA as our partner several years ago due to its world-renowned services and proficient products. GIATA is acknowledged for its human approach and efforts in reading, interpreting, analyzing and selecting the right mapping, from a great mix of manual and automated processes, for little to no errors and for information carefully corrected, mostly by hand.

GIATA, the Berlin-based travel technology company, has been helping travel companies and hoteliers since 1996 with the support of more than 150 employees, handling the processing and maintenance of huge volumes of hotel data.

With millions of mappings of 338 supplier feeds for more than 1.1 million unique properties, GIATA manages the world’s largest hotel mapping database and other market-leading content solutions for more than 21,500 users in 74 countries.

 

About wbe.travel

wbe.travel, the European based company provides a complete, robust product suite, hosted in the cloud, to travel companies such as DMCs, TMCS, Travel Agencies, Wholesalers and Tour Operators.

wbe.travel has implemented more than 100 systems all over the world and has helped travel companies distribute their travel inventory with the state of the art technology. The off the shelf software products cover a full range of processes from production, contracting, mid-office management to API distribution.

With more than a decade long experience in the travel industry, wbe.travel is 100% dedicated to increase productivity and most importantly to grow the sales of its clients using end-to-end software solutions.