Several startups have failed at mastering online travel planning and booking for small groups, but Groupize hopes a new connection to the TravelClick central reservation system and accompanying agreement will put the process on the right track.
TravelClick agreed to connect its iHotelier CRS to Groupize, giving more than 5,000 hotels, primarily in the US, the potential ability to manage their rates and inventory on the group-booking site.
Charles de Gaspe Beaubien, Groupize CEO, says under the agreement the TravelClick sales force will seek to sign up properties to manage their rates and inventory for small-group travel planning and booking on Groupize.
Groupize relaunched in beta as a booking site for groups early this year and hopes to move to the next stage with the TravelClick agreement, as well as those with the Wyndham Worldwide and Westgate Resorts.
“To come out of beta we need enough supply,” says de Gaspe Beaubien, who estimates that the company will have agreements for negotiated rates with “10,000 hotels within the next month.”
In March, de Gaspe Beaubien had talked about 25,000 properties having already enlisted, but this number referred to technical tie-ins and not commercial agreements to provide negotiated rates.
Pegasus Solutions also provides connectivity to Groupize, although without a further agreement it is for retail, not group, rates.
De Gaspe Beaubien says he also has commitments from several other chains, although they have not yet been publicized.
With Groupize, travel planners can access group rates for five to 25 rooms, book them and manage changes.
De Gaspe Beaubien claims about 80% of the work can be handled online, while 20% of the communications occurs offline.
Groupize is seeking to go where others — such as Groople and Group Travel Planet — have tread before and found the path challenging. Both companies winded down in 2008.
De Gaspe Beaubien thinks he has a handle on where they fell short, saying:
There are different reasons why, but mostly they were too soon online. Â The planners weren’t ready to book groups online, and patterns have changed since then. The RFP Explosion shows how many planners are now doing their research online. Â Another major issue was the technology of the time and what they had to spend to try and make this. Â They also spent a lot of money creating social tools for their sites that now exist with Facebook.
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Would be very interesting to see how this project plays out. Of course – a major challenge would be to bring a lot of properties together onto this platform – going one by one could prove as a rather expensive exercise!
We’ve been grappling with the challenge of group booking ourselves for our clients – and how to make it possible with 250,000 unique properties in one shot. The technology is there, and it is possible!
Diagram may be seen here: http://ow.ly/i/HTn3
Many full-service OTAs offering hotels rely on global hotel wholesalers (GTA, GOGlobal, JacTravel, Kuoni, TotalStay, etc’) for their hotels availability.
Combining 15 wholesalers and standardizing (deduping) their results, brings the count to 250,000 unique hotel properties worldwide (may be accessed through our API)
The main challenge for group bookings, is that none of the existing wholesalers are set up to facilitate booking of more than 4 rooms at a time. Enter deduping:
A. Search for 10 rooms through a single API > query multiple suppliers, 2 rooms each.
B. Results received then merged to a package (same hotel, 5 suppliers, 2 rooms each = 10).
C. Results bundled onto a single group offering
D. Booking completed.
Our main concern (would be great to hear some professional remarks on that) is that this type of bookings are within supplier’s terms and conditions how would hotels look on that as the rates coming through are considered FIT and not Group rates (which are usually higher)?