Mr and Mrs Smith, the UK-based luxe hotel guide and reservation brand, has come a long way in the past few years, especially given its latest decision to scrap a technology partnership to start from scratch and build its own booking system.
An existing agreement with TravelIntelligence, which saw the review company’s Starfish platform plugged into the back end of the Smith system, will come to an end in December 2009 to be replaced with a piece of technology created in-house.
The decision to create SAMS – Smith Availability Management System – is one which affects many travel firms which have in the past used third party software to power critical parts of their business.
Not only did the previous system confuse customers with mixed messages on credit card bills (from Starfish), but contracting hotels by Smith’s team was difficult in terms of understanding where room inventory ultimately resided.
There is also another important element to consider – many travel brands suddenly find that they have simply outgrown the previous system and are, perhaps most importantly, also reluctant to hand over their hard earned commission to a third party.
So Mr and Mrs Smith has spent around £100,000 and a considerable amount of time creating its own platform to allow reservations both online and offline via a centralised database.
Hoteliers are also able to manage their own content including availability, room descriptions and associated images.
The SAMS system, as many will notice, was created without the need of a GDS.
Thanks Kevin
The most ‘interesting’ part of building our own has been trying to cater for all our different properties. our collection spans large city hotels, small B&B’s, restaurants with rooms and a self catering collection of cottages and villas. It has been so important for us to cater for all of these and give them all the functionality and flexibility they need – a tall order when you look at the variety of reservations systems and processes they run. Some of them I’m sure still do bookings via carrier pigeon|!
Anything called ‘sam’ has got to have quality written all over it
What will the hotel booking scene look like in 10 years time? Tamara’s comment about the varieties of properties and accommodations, and how flexible the system needs to be to cope, underlines the challenge – the hotel industry worldwide, especially in Europe, is still massively fragmented. Will a SAMS type system – or the rebuilt Starfish – dominate this market? Or, as now, will we be offered an array of booking intermediaries, and will hotels have to employ someone just to update them?
Hi Jamie
Wasn’t the GDS supposed to be the one and only big system that hotels had to update? Maybe there will one day be a system that every new piece of technology will have to integrate but with such a fragmented market and new options such as INOQO cropping up on a daily basis my bets would be that this won’t happen soon.
Note also that hotels already employ people JUST to update availability. For the larger hotels with big inventories and multiple rates it’s a full time job for at least one person.
Very interesting how this mirrors our own decision at isango! to build our own system, and we are in a similar very fragmented and diverse range of activity operators (who are also using the same carrier pigeon).
But at least our category is just starting to be consolidated, while in hotels there are a plethora of tech solutions. It also mirrors the story from @ekbergh on his blog about taking the same decision to own the technology.
So this leads me to a couple of considerations.
1. Are travel technology providers all sleeping and unable to understand and provide the flexibility and customisation needed by all of us to be different and unique?
or 2. is this possible while we are at a reasonable size but it might become too expensive to mantain at very large scale, so only large companies would benefit from off-the-shelf products?
or 3. Is owning your own life more valuable than the potential cost advantage of a standard solution?
I have seen lots of companies with lots of different answers. I guess everyone has different views about all of the above.
I think its easier to build a travel company if you already have a reservation system than to build a reservation system if you already have a travel company….. now there is an idea !
Hi Alex – not really. You need customers first to know what and how they want to reserve!
GDS please come forward.
Well here I am. 1730 Friday evening reading this article and all relevant comments.
First of all, I wish all the best to Mr & Mrs Smith with their SAMS development. I believe this will be a challenging project but certainly interesting to watch, especially when the time will come for hotel adoption to use this new system.
No, the GDS or technology providers are not sleeping (cheeky comment from Daniele). We are very much evolving. If you look at the content available on Amadeus today, we have reached more than 85,000 hotels compared to 70,000 in the same month in 2006. Most of the incremental content come from independant hotels wishing to extend their distribution channels worldwide and reach travel agents like the TMCs.
We agree, we don’t have all hotels available on the GDS. And it’s not because it is a difficult task to be on the GDS. A lot of companies like Synxis, Otedis, TravelClick, Unirez have been created for independant hotels to be visible on the different GDS travel agency platforms (previously only reserved to international hotel groups).
Whether we will have the estimated 400,000 hotels available around the world on the GDS in the future is not really an objective in itself. As Tamara mentions, some hotels still take bookings via carrier pigeons or via the good old telephone that (still) lot of human beings love to use these days. Other hotels prefer to only sell direct through their website because their inventory is so small (below 9 rooms), it’s not worth to look at automation. Others believe they can manage full occupancy with endless extranets to manage and receive booking in their email inbox. I have seen hotels before biting their nails looking at how they manage inventory with 20 extranets. Quite a challenge.
The good news for hotels is that they have the choice about how they want to be distributed online and offline. They have the choice to be efficient or not. They have the choice to be more visible on the front desk or hide behing computers updating the extranet of Booking.com or Expedia.com (again I have seen this before). They have the choice to manage inventory, CRM, billing through a Property Management System or use the good old notepad and paper calendar. They have the choice to use Revenue Management tool to decide at what price they should sell their rooms or just rely on fixed pricing (week and weekend). The list can go on (CRS, ADS,…).
At the end of the day it’s all about measuring the cost of receiving a booking with all these different channels and also bearing in mind the cost of human resources to use all these great tools available today.
If you are a hotel selling 80% of your rooms through one single OTA, it’s worth to consider using their own system to load inventory. If it’s to sell one room here and there, not sure using another extranet is the right strategy to distribute your rooms.
Let’s not forget also the big risk of overbooking when you manage too many booking systems.
Enjoy the weekend!
Guillaume
Amadeus UK & Ireland
Great commnents and good point from Guillaume
Well, Hotelier can use Channel Manager to load and manage all their extranets (around 15 tools are on the market and 5 or 6 are good or very good)
Smart hotelier now how to invest in IT and tools to manage their distribution and Yield. And they make money, save time and headack
Unfortunatly, may small hotels now how to invest in their rooms, cuisine and lobby look & feel (they can spend lot of money on that), but to invest in IT and sales and marketing online, it’s a big “plouf”
Positive view, it’s good for the Mr & Ms Smith business
sorry for the mistake, I forgot the K at ‘now” >> know how
Yes, a good move in the short term. Control your destiny (ish)
I am trying to sound positive as the technical skills required to deliver on a project like this are high – so Mr & Mrs Smith should be congratulated [and they won on Tuesday awards night too!]
Reason for hesitation is that I kind of see the market going in a different way but I am struggling to explain it concisely [Also I haven't been in hotel sector for a while, now much more interested in tours / activities - which are following behind the hotel sector - but perhaps not making the same mistakes]
I will write up some thoughts (but not for a few weeks as don’t want to hijack this thread) and see what people think we may be doing in 2-5 years time.
@CLaude: We’ve seen the emergence of channel managers from TravelClick, @ RateTiger and more…but I have yet seen small hotels using these tools. Talking about pricing, I am not sure a small property can afford to pay a channel manager. Also how long can it be reliable for.
For example, I am this hotel in London and decide to work with Mr & Mrs Smith and need to access to SAMS system through my channel manager. How long will it take for mny channel manager to be compatible with SAMS?
@Alex: please hijack this thread, any ideas and thoughts are welcome. Especially from you with your IT experience.
@Guillaume
About channel manager
- leading tool have more than 400 extranets in management
- leading provider implement 5 to 10 new extranet per months
- after checking the potential, they can make a new connexion within 2 or 3 weeks
- leading channel manager have also xml interface with other tools and booking engine and so one.
I think a channel manager is interesting for small hotel (ex: starting with 20 rooms or more) who already manage 5 extranets and want more distribution and efficiency.
it’s not a IT problem, even a budget problem, small hotel are not educate to invest in marketing online.
We need a evangelist army to change their mentality !
Bon week end Guillaume
Firstly thank you all for your positive encouragement.
Alex – I’d love to hear your thoughts on where you think the market will go.
I truly believe this is the right decision for us now both tactically and financially. Hotel adoption is key but we are hoping that the hotels we represent will see the value in continuing to provide us with inventory to sell because of our historic relationship with them as well as the system being so easy to use that even an untrained receptionist can update it.
I’ll keep you all posted as to how it goes and also our plans for integration with other systems.