Open booking
of what is coming up so that people can plan their business trip around it.” That said, the site virtually always has good central London hotels available. “But even in places like Paris and New York, we do not always have hotels available,” says Collins. Spare-room booking portal Airbnb is the granddaddy of this new sector. It was founded in 2008 and has grown to the point where it handled 3 million guests in 2012 and has booked over 10 million room nights. Around one-fifth of people using Airbnb say they are travelling on business, and the portal has recently introduced facilities that allow you to add a business name to a reservation and also to generate a VAT invoice. The VAT issue is an interesting one. Many of the hotel booking sites will only allow you to reclaim VAT on their commission or service fee, rather than the full value of the booking, since they are acting as agents.
SHARING CONTENT The glue that could make open booking and these new start-ups stick in business travel is the API (application programming interface) – the standardised data pipes that booking sites can use to share their content with others, including online booking tools. Room 77, for instance, allows others to plug into their hotel content via an API, believing that it brings mutual benefits.
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KDS’s Berteloot believes these new entrants will open up their APIs. “Take the example of Easyjet,” he says. “The airline said it was not interested in business travellers. Now it is increasingly distributed through traditional channels and have services just for the business travel industry. “The internet has made it easier for more and more suppliers to distribute, and most start-ups are now starting from scratch with a pretty standard API.” Troy Collins at Secret Escapes says providing booking through an API would be a logical evolution. “Once a hotel’s deal is live, they just want to sell as many rooms as they possibly can.” It already sells its hotels through white label sites with partners such as The Guardian and Skyscanner. APIs are not the only way of getting access to open booking transactions.
The trick, says Concur’s Montesdeoca, is getting your arms around the spend data generated by these sites by whatever means necessary – not surprisingly, she cites Concur’s Tripit tool. “You find a place to stay that is five minutes from your meeting on one of these sites and send the email generated
Once a hotel’s deal is live they just want to sell as many rooms as they possibly can
by the site to Tripit, and it gets absorbed into your itinerary. Using it doesn’t require Airbnb or any of these new sites to open up their APIs yet. It can be done off email,” she says. “Without significant effort, you can have all these bookings in the Concur system, giving visibility to the finance team where that spend is happening.” Triplink is Concur’s other service that allows companies to embrace open booking. Travellers book on a supplier website, obtain corporate- negotiated rates and Triplink does the
work behind the scenes to bring the travel and transaction data back into its system. It is going further, too. This
year, it will add a feature called Price to Beat, which will offer average benchmark prices for point-to-point travel, whether booked through the main Concur online booking tool or brought in through Triplink. Concur says this will open the playing field for open booking because a company can take action on controlling spend by means of data gathering rather than simply enforcing online booking rules. Final words on the subject
go to UBS’s Mark Cuschieri. He sees a bright future for open booking, but as part of a hybrid approach, “as and when corporate technology enables vast access to such rich content – which will ultimately deliver greater choice, increased compliance and duty-of-care, all within a clear and confined travel booking framework”.
BOOKING WEBSITES SITE
www.airbnb.com beta.olset.com
www.dayhalt.com
www.hoteltonight.com www.rocketmiles.com
www.room77.com www.roomertravel.com www.secretescapes.com www.sharetrip.com www.tingo.com www.top10.com DIFFERENTIATOR Book a stay in someone’s spare room
Add Olset’s email to your meeting invites and it emails you a personalised selection of hotels based on preferences
Book a room for a few hours during the day Mobile-only bookings for same-day hotels
Book a hotel and earn significantly more frequent flyer points than would normally be the case
Hotel search, digital floor maps and free concierge for people staying in more expensive premium hotels
Book a hotel room from someone who has already booked it, but no longer needs it and cannot cancel
Private members’ club access to last-minute rooms in four- and five-star hotels
Real-time sharing and collaboration between travellers during hotel booking
Book a hotel and automatically get a refund if the price drops before you arrive
Compares prices between the leading online travel agents and spits out the top ten
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2014
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