What is Hotel Mapping – How important is it?

Travel companies who sell the hotels as a service or travel companies whose major business depended on Hotel sales like Hotel Suppliers, Aggregators, Large Travel Agencies understand the pain of incorrect hotel mapping.

Selling the wrong hotel to the customers just because the hotel results were incorrect or duplicate or stale information about pricing and availability not only result in the loss of money but also result in the loss of a valuable customer.

Accruing a customer in this competitive travel industry is tough and also because of bad hotel mapping resulting in unhappy customers and bad reviews for the travel agency.

So, basically hotel mapping is a process of de duplicating the hotel results i.e. showing the same hotel once in the search result and now with the latest technology de duplicating the room types from the respective property as well – which is called as room level mapping.

Why do travel agencies or hotel suppliers face this issue and it’s only limited to hotels only not to flights, the reason being for flights there is a globally centralized naming structure for airlines, airports, routes, etc. and for the flights, inventory is limited globally and flow centralized names

1. Duplication of Hotel Property and Rooms:

In the case of Hotels, there are thousands and thousands of hotels globally, and these hotels and hundreds of thousand rooms. The hotel itself keeps on changing the names of their rooms and rarely the hotel name itself in case there is a change in the ownership of the property.

The major challenge is various hotel suppliers who have the direct contacts with the hotels like Hotelbeds, Rezlive, TBO, Stuba, W2M, GRN Connect when they enter the information about the hotel & room types they create their own verbiage for Hotel Name & Room Names For example:

Suppliers	Hotel Property	Room Name – Palm Room
	Atlantis – Dubai	Room Only	With Breakfast	Half Board	Full Board	All Inclusive
Hotelbeds	The Atlantis	Palm Room – Room Only	Palm Room – With Breakfat	Palm Room – Half Board
LOH	Atlantis Dubai	The Palm Room	The Palm Room – B	The Palm Room – HB	The Palm Room – FB	The Palm Room – AI
Rezlive	Atlantis Hotel	Palm Room	Breakfat inclusive Palm Room	Half Board Palm Room	Full Board Palm Room
TBO	The Atlantis Dubai	Plam Room Only	Palm Room Breakfat	Palm Room Halfboard		Palm Room All Inclusive
Stuba	Atlatis Dubai	Palm RO		The Palm Room – HB	The Palm Room – FB	The Palm Room – AI
W2M	Atlantis Dubai	Altantis Plam Room	Altantis Plam Room – Breakfat	Altantis Plam Room – 2 Meals
GRN Connect	Atlantis Hotel	Palm Room	Breakfat inclusive Palm Room	Half Board Palm Room	Full Board Palm Room

In the above example, the same hotel property – Atlantis – Dubai is listed with a different name by the suppliers, and the room name – Palm Room is also named different from various board basis offered by each supplier.  

So, the major issue faces by Travel Agency or Hotel Aggregator is that the same hotel is returned in the search result more than once and once you have selected the property – the same room type can be called several times – not by the cheapest rates for the same room type.

Room level mapping is still a challenge and works in progress for many technology companies offering hotel mapping solutions.

This is just 1 example assuming the number of hotels available globally multiply the hotel property level problem with million times and room level mapping problem with billion times.

• Hotel information and inventory is not up to date:

This is the 2^nd major issues faced by travel agencies or hotel suppliers/aggregators, as hotels keep on updating their offers, availability & prices so if travel agencies don’t update and maintain the latest information and also updating the mapping for the latest hotel static (Excluding Pricing & Availability) they end up selling the wrong hotel or right hotel with the wrong prices & availability.

So, end up selling the stale content – they need to keep updating the information as and when updated by the suppliers & map the latest content, at least one a month.

Solution Providers:

So, to cope up with such a situation you can subscribe for hotel mapping service providers like from Vernost Solutions – Ve Travel (www.vetravel.io) offering product name Simple Sorted – Provides mapping as a service.

Travelgate X – is again one of the most reliable providers offering mapping as a services and other solutions as well.

GIATA – Its I believe is the oldest player in the market offering mapping as a service.

Before choosing any provider, you should check the accuracy % which company claims and probably from the market as well.

Also look at the long terms perspective of how good is the company, flexibility, reliability, etc.

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