Amadeus has significantly boosted its hotel porfolio via a deal with corporate accommodation specialist HRS.
The deal will see 250,000 hotels from HRS made available via Amadeus e-Travel Management corporate booking tool as well as the Amadeus Selling Platform for travel agencies.
The partnership, which Amadeus is describing as a ‘landmark agreement’, will provide access to the additional hotel content to agencies and corporate bookers by the second quarter of this year.
The deal includes 50,000 independent hotels, a segment which GDSs have traditionally struggled to offer forcing the business travel community to shop around online.
The independent properties are said to be currently distributed exclusively through HRS.
In October, Travelport unveiled a deal to add independent properties to its Travelport Rooms And More service via a deal with France-based Fastbooking.
A year ago Travelport also signed an agreement to offer Hotelzon‘s 100,000 properties to agents via its Universal API.
In October Amadeus revealed that it was working on advanced search technology for hotels, similar to that released for flights in 2009.
The GDS also said it was working to integrate more hotel aggregators in the back-end which would sit alongside traditional GDS hotel content.
Wow! This announcement seems to imply that Amadeus will never be able to attract independent hotels on their GDS platform. At least not in the large scale.
On another note, I strongly doubt that HRS has exclusivity on the distribution of 50,000 hotels. in 2012, hoteliers have learned a trick or two about not putting their eggs in the same basket.
Last but not least, HRS have always claimed to have the biggest number of hotels among OTAs with 250,000 hotels. Something that Booking.com can’t even match. Any reasons why?
If 50,000 hotels are independent, it means 200,000 are from hotel groups and GDS typically have about 100,000 hotels from mostly all hotels group in this planet in their books. Does that mean HRS have hotel groups from another planet we don’t know about? Another 100,000 hotels…
This is almost certainly as a result of their recent deal with Hotel.de, who have for some time been able to provide their inventory to Amadeus.
And Guillaime is right, I am a small independent hotelier, and my property is available on pretty much every mainstream channel going, thanks to channel management technology.