Techtalks: Traveltech

Hello Ted,

We haven’t heard of that kind of software. Usually, channel managers and other travel data providers reveal their data to hotels, property/revenue management systems, online travel agencies, and metasearch engines – basically, customer- or hotel-facing businesses to support room reservation.

Without any detail about the problem you're trying to solve, it’s hard to suggest anything specific. But if you consider data mining and analysis, consider open datasets like these on data.world. Also, check what’s available on data.gov for hotels, and Kaggle for hotel reviews.

Have a look at our article on mining public datasets. These datasets can provide you with locations, reviews, and some inventory details. But if you're looking for pricing and changes in pricing over time, this might be a much trickier data-mining problem. There are some datasets with pricing like this one but usually the pricing and demand data isn’t available in dataset formats.

I hope this helps.

Hi Olexander
Thanks for your reply and the associated links.
I appreciate my question wasn't very specific- I was just trying to understand whether any channel management software providers ever provide hotel rates to other products to allow the data mining of these rates and potentially bookings following this analysis.
Maybe it's the wrong forum for this discussion and I'm more than happy to email more details direct if you've got the time to consider.
Thanks again
Ted

Hello Ted,

If you're okay with sharing some details here, I can try answering your questions. Unfortunately, we haven’t heard of any channel managers that provide hotel rates to other products.

Hi Olexander
It's likely my lack of understanding so apologies in advance.
Is it correct that a channel manager product connects to an OTA (or multiple OTA's) seamlessly for transferring as a minimum room rates and availability and in return receives bookings from the OTA via the channel manager to pass onto the PMS??
If an hotel is using a particular channel manager and they want to connect to say Expedia then when they configure Expedia (having got a partnership agreed) then does the hotel 'simply' select from within the Expedia setup the relevant channel manager product and they're on line through that OTA?
If the channel manager connects to multiple OTAs then can I assume the channel manager product has either supported the OTAs API 'for channel management' or less likely in terms of the larger OTA's the OTA has supported the channel manager own API?
Sorry if this is incorrect but in a nutshell I'm trying to understand the pieces and the integrations.
Thanks again for any help.
Best regards
Ted
 

Hi Ted,

"Is it correct that a channel manager product connects to an OTA (or multiple OTA’s) seamlessly for transferring as a minimum room rates and availability and in return receives bookings from the OTA via the channel manager to pass onto the PMS??"

Yes, that correct.

"If an hotel is using a particular channel manager and they want to connect to say Expedia then when they configure Expedia (having got a partnership agreed) then does the hotel ‘simply’ select from within the Expedia setup the relevant channel manager product and they’re on line through that OTA?"

Not exactly. Normally, you can configure the connection to your channels (OTAs) right from the channel manager interface without dealing with OTAs directly.

"If the channel manager connects to multiple OTAs then can I assume the channel manager product has either supported the OTAs API ‘for channel management’ or less likely in terms of the larger OTA’s the OTA has supported the channel manager own API?"

That’s correct. For instance, Booking.com Connectivity APIs are created specifically for channel managers and property management systems.

I hope this helps!

Hi Olexander
That’s really helpful thank you.
I’ll likely have more questions in time but for now I’ve got a much better understanding.
Best regards
Ted
 

Hi Olexander
Its been some time since I last contacted you and hopefully you can help again.
We have developed software to access hotel data from the the larger OTA API's (and some GDSs) but understandably (in hindsight!) these systems are rate limited to prevent excessive loads on them (limiting the number of API calls a provider can make per minute before the API returns HTTP/1.1 429 Too Many Requests). This means mining for rates for length of stays is impracticle. Do you have any suggestions or ideas on overcoming this limitation other than perhaps integrating closer to the source of this hotel data (like with the RMS - not sure if this is possible or the implications?).
Thanks for any feedback.
Best regards
Ted

Hi Olexander
One more question you may be able to help with...although I suspect it'll be difficult to answer.
In the google hotel Ads API, if I understand it correctly, google requires connected hotels to provide all pricing data for a period of 30 days for each length of stay between 1 and 7 days. Do you know if google applies rate limiting to developers who may want to query this data?
Thanks
Ted