How to get live rates for hotels without GDS
One of our customers asked this question and even we thought it should be posted with the elaborative answer.
We believe your target is to have an Online Travel Agency with real-time hotel rates and live booking feature.
It totally depends on your 2P (ie, Patience and Pocket). It’s not only about rates there are other important aspects that has to be considered. No one is going to make a hotel booking without looking at hotel/room images, amenities, location etc.
Now, Let’s take a scenario. I am located in Lahore ( Pakistan ) and I will surely want to start from here. So I will hire 10 telecaller who will call different hotels and collect the contracted rates. A telecaller can handle a maximum of 10–20 hotels a day, apart from collecting rates, they will even have to collect the Hotel Images, Hotel Description, Their Exact number of rooms, amenities, latitude-longitude etc (Bare in mind, amenities can be critical at times dealing with customers so it should be exactly what hotel offers).
If all goes well, I will be able to achieve the rates of almost all the Delhi hotels in 2 months (considering there are 1000 hotels in Delhi). I will now target the other popular destinations in India like Mumbai, Goa, Chennai etc. I must be scared as there are around millions of destinations in India itself.
I somehow managed to receive the above-said details from the hotel. But this would be of no use if I don’t have a proper management. So I must have a tool/website where I should be able to feed such contents/rates.
NOTE: But by the time I started new destinations, I discovered that the collected hotel rates of previous destinations got changed. Huh! Maybe my team was too small to handle the job. I will have to hire more people and invest more.
We talked about the labor, Now let’s talk about the investment. Let’s keep the salary of every single telecaller around 10K around $200. I have already invested in the followings
- Salary of 10 People till now (After 2 months)
- Management Tool / Website
- Sales Person, Booking, Cancellation Team
Every customer wants a one-stop shop, where he should be able to book the hotels of almost all the destination he wishes to visit. Or else, it might be too difficult to make the customer revisit and overall a site with limited destinations doesn’t seem to be reliable to customers.
Achievement: Even after I added a lot of effort, money etc. I discovered that I have rates of very limited cities if we compare it to Big Travel Sites, like Expedia, Booking etc. To be frank, I got stuck in India and didn’t even thought about covering other countries yet. End of the day, even I would like to generate some penny after all the above efforts.
I hope this makes sense. I know, I know, there are lot many people who just talk about issues and I might be sounding one of them. So let’s talk about the solution.
Solution: You can go with any API based inventories where you will get hotels and its rates from all over the world. Then you start replacing the hotels of your own contracted ones. You will not be having a time limitation and you can start promoting only the destinations which have your hotels and rates on the very first day. As you will be having worldwide hotels, you will sound BIG to your customers and there would be maximum chances of customers visiting again.
We can help you with the customized software. We have done the same thing with many of our customer who wanted to have their online presence along with the requirements something similar to you.
Please feel free to type your comments in the below comment box or email us at info@phptravels.com in case we could help you anyway.