What should all OTAs consider in order to offer a valuable channel to suppliers?
Published: 02 May 2008
Interview with Zuji's Roshan Mendis
Given the advent of new technology and opportunities to direct connect more cost effectively, suppliers are looking for distribution solutions that offer them the ability to easily connect and market to the right audiences at the right value.
In this context, what is critical from an OTA's perspective?
Zuji's Director of Supplier Relations and Partnerships Roshan Mendis says it is important to provide hoteliers with a valuable channel to access customers. This takes into consideration not only the cost of connecting, which is a major part, but the value of the transaction, lead times, in hotel services purchases made by guests, efficient customer service and prompt payment.
"As an OTA we are focused on all those facets and our relationships with suppliers, hotels and others, are governed by the single focus of adding value to them sustainably for the long-term," Mendis told EyeforTravel.com's Ritesh Gupta in an interview recently.
Mendis also spoke about XML, participating in building specifications with the OpenTravel Alliance and much more. Excerpts:
Ritesh Gupta: What role do you foresee XML playing in future especially when it is being said that Open Travel Alliance (OTA) has been working very hard on expanding their transaction sets to provide viable options for more trading partners?
XML and web services already play a huge role in our everyday business. Across all our products at Zuji: air, hotel, packaging, we utilise XML in various ways to gather content from internal and external sources. Zuji, as part of the Sabre network of companies globally, participates in building specifications with the OTA and we've implemented several of their standards for our air booking products. In this industry, XML technologies and specifications standardisation, are vastly important in streamlining our business processes and improving our product time to market.
Ritesh Gupta: How is Zuji or the OTA industry focusing on connectivity products, eradicating manual maintenance of rates and inventory to focus on a seamless interface that automates these functions?
Roshan Mendis: Zuji's business is highly automated, and a true online travel agency. As such, manual tasks are minimised where possible for two reasons: for the cost and time efficiencies gained by replacing offline with online functionality. With our Preferred hotel program (the Travelocity Net Rate Hotel Program) hoteliers update their inventory allocations, specials and value-adds in real time, online via an extranet. These changes are then automatically reflected when a customer searches Zuji for hotel availability, deals, room types, pricing etc.
In an ideal world, airlines too would update all of this information (pricing, schedule changes, and rules wavers in crisis, etc) online which would ultimately assist customers, and customer care teams better serve the public. Currently, much of the net rate fares and deals must be manually loaded, which adds cost to our business, and slows the ability for us to offer the deals to customers.
What's really called for is the hotel and broader travel industry to better self-regulate a fair approach to online hotel pricing. An ethical and united approach would call for correct pricing displays and punish any 'bait' advertising of unavailable room rates or types, or the appearance of wholesale room rates below paridy agreements. In Asia, many online sites take a less ethical approach than Zuji does (we follow paridy or work with hotels on special, approved promotions). Ultimately, poor customer experiences online on some sites undermines the overall trust hoteliers have in the OTA industry – and customers experiences online. Paridy pricing is definitely something we at Zuji are trying to actively raise the industry bar on.
Ritesh Gupta: Significantly when it comes to controlling costs, do you think hoteliers often miss out on technology costs and support costs? Also, ideally, if the focus is on highest revenue customer with the lowest required support with the highest lifetime value that books through the lowest cost channel, how tough is it today to manage this?
Roshan Mendis: At Zuji, every customer, and booking, is equally important. The approach we take is to work very closely with hoteliers, especially in our most-booked destinations, to ensure we help each other to drive hotel room-night bookings as part of coordinated and scheduled campaigns. Zuji can offer these integrated marketing campaigns for individual hotels on our seven core online travel sites in Asia Pacific, and beyond to our network of international sites (Travelocity in North America, and lastminute.com un United Kingdom). By working in this way, hoteliers have time to create unique opportunities for the online channel, and our customers gain exclusive deals or value adds which have been forged with hoteliers for mutually beneficial outcomes. Behind the scenes, technological innovation in CRM and on site merchandising and booking assist the process, and good old fashioned business relationships and strategies are at the core of great marketing and merchandising online with Zuji.
(EyeforTravel.com will feature Roshan Mendis' viewpoint on dynamic packaging next month.
EyeforTravel is also conducting A Distribution Technology Track, at the Travel Distribution Summit Europe 2008. The conference will take place in London on May 20 and 21. For more information click here:
http://events.eyefortravel.com/tds/online-sales-and-marketing-conference...
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