What’s Next For The CRS?
Single-screen inventory and rate management for hoteliers, and single-screen, graphic-laden booking engines for consumers are the latest innovations.
By Derek Gale, Associate Editor -- HOTELS Magazine, 7/1/2006
As the distribution landscape continues to evolve, as channels become more numerous and as customer behavior changes, what role or roles should the central reservation system (CRS) play? Whom should it be geared toward? And what can we expect from such systems in the future? “Our strategy around CRSs and where the industry needs to go is looking at the CRS as the distribution center point,” says Scott Farrell, senior vice president of product management at Schaumburg, Illinois-based TravelCLICK. “Hoteliers [should be] looking to it as that sales system or entity where you are touching customers at any point customers want to touch you. One shift we truly believe in today and going forward is around the merchandising of product—driving demand to the hotel and how the CRS can help in that space. We don’t see the CRS as just a transaction engine. We see it as a merchandising engine.”
To that end, TravelCLICK recently debuted its new one-screen, single-page interactive booking engine, iStay (part of its iHotelier CRS), at HITEC. Making use of Flash technology, the interface is all about ease of use and making sure the product is merchandised effectively, giving the consumer an opportunity to upgrade at the point of purchase. “iStay, as the name suggests, puts the customer in the driver’s seat. For the first time a hotel can interact with the consumer around the product that they have available (at the point of purchase),” Farrell says. He refers to everything from using quality digital images of room offerings that allow consumers to upsell themselves, to add-on amenities that let consumers create their own packages. “At the point of interaction is where you’re really going to capture revenue,” he notes. Henry Harteveldt, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research, agrees, noting that distribution channels now are becoming merchandising channels. He says hotel distribution has moved beyond rate and inventory and is increasingly integrated into sales and marketing.
Farrell says TravelCLICK looks at the CRS from both the hotelier and the consumer sides: “We think about how the hotel interacts with the systems and executes on its strategy, but also how the consumer interacts with the system and its ease of use, because that is where the bigger bang for the buck is. As a CRS provider, we take that very seriously.” Down the line, Farrell says CRSs will continue to make it easier for hoteliers to execute on their strategies and drive revenue, while consumers will see demand drivers in the form of more compelling imagery and digital content and more flexibility in defining their own stays. “There will be more around packaging, and more on letting consumers design their own packages and allowing the hotel to take advantage of that,” he says.
Dallas-based Pegasus Solutions has some similar ideas. The latest version of its RezView CRS includes single-screen management that provides hoteliers with quick summaries of room inventory, availability and controls, and an integrated view of inventory and rates. Plus, “Hoteliers have a tool which makes it easy to update rates across multiple rate plans in just one step,” says Dennis Law, senior vice president of product management. Coming down the line will be single-screen rate management, he adds, and further rate plan flexibility in terms of linking plans to allow for better packaging options. Law says Pegasus is talking to and listening to its hotel customers, trying to give them the ease of use they are seeking while also simplifying things for the end-user making the buying decision, whether it is the individual traveler or a travel agent.
In other developments, Pegasus’ NetBooker booking engine has been enhanced and now features e-concierge capabilities so that guests can reserve a massage, add champagne to their hotel stay or request an airport transfer when booking. For further on-property packaging, with the new GolfSwitch WebPro service, hotels using NetBooker can give guests the ability to book a golf tee time after they have confirmed their hotel reservations. “This is how we add value—extending technology so the hotel can add to its value proposition,” Law says.
As for the future of reservation systems, like TravelCLICK, Law says Pegasus will do more with dynamic packaging—both on property and off—and will continue to improve the management of inventory and tying that to customer relationship management and revenue management solutions.
Direct comments to: derek.gale@reedbusiness.com
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| Pegasus’ latest version of its RezView CRS (above, l.) offers hoteliers easy inventory management, while TravelCLICK’s new iStay booking engine (above, r.) allows consumers to upsell themselves at the point of purchase. Click on images for larger view. |
| Travel Agent GDS Bookings Deliver Higher ADR For Hotels |
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WORLDWIDE Brick and mortar travel agencies have been hit hard by the rise of online travel sites, and some in the travel and tourism trade continue to predict their eventual extinction. Meanwhile, many hoteliers continue to put on traveling road shows to market to this supposed dying breed. Why? Travel agents remain the dominant source of GDS hotel e-business, representing 84.9% of total room nights in the first quarter of 2006, according to TravelCLICK’s eMonitor results. They also continue to be a key source of higher rate business for hotels: The average rate for room nights booked through travel agents was 37.1% higher than the average rate for room nights booked via the Internet, according to eMonitor results for the first quarter. Also, travel agent room nights via the GDS are growing, up 8.5% in the first quarter, driving a 13.9% revenue growth over the same period in 2005. “The travel agent channel continues to show consistent growth each quarter while securing higher ADR bookings for hotels,” says John Hach, vice president of product management, e-marketing products, for TravelCLICK. “This stable growth is ensuring GDS as an important element of a hotel’s overall integrated distribution strategies.” Indeed, while “the GDS has long been touted to disappear, it continues to grow year after year,” notes Scott Farrell, senior vice president of product management. TravelCLICK expects the GDS channel to go down the same path of billion-dollar growth in 2006, reaching a new high of US$18 billion in booked revenue. This movement is driven by a nine-month trend of double-digit growth from brick and mortar travel agencies. “Due to its highly effective target marketing, we expect the GDS to maintain its 30+% share of bookings over the next two years,” says Robert Post, president and CEO of TravelCLICK. Adds Farrell, “What I say to any hotel is make sure you understand where the business is and make sure you are capturing your fair share. There is an opportunity there to be had.” Some 34.6% of central reservation office reservations came through GDS channels in 2005, according to the full-year eTRAK results. |
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