Allowing Marriott to better manage online bookings from metasearch sites Kayak, Roomkey, Trivago, Qunar and others.
As travel metasearch engine websites gain in popularity with travelers, more hotel companies are turning to DerbySoft for its metasearch online distribution connectivity and caching technology. One of the latest large hoteliers to work with DerbySoft is Marriott International. DerbySoft is based in Dallas, Texas, and Shanghai, China, and provides technology services to eight of the 10 largest hotel companies in the world, as well as many of the world’s largest online travel agencies (OTA) and metasearch sites.
To date, the metasearch sites to which DerbySoft has connected Marriott are Priceline’s Kayak; RoomKey; Expedia’s Trivago, the market leader in Europe; and Qunar, a travel metasearch site whose majority stake is owned by Baidu, China’s largest search engine.
As “one-stop shops” for travelers that seek to quickly compare different travel options, travel metasearch sites are specialized travel aggregators that provide online listings from hotel suppliers such as hotel companies, central reservations system (CRS) providers, and OTAs.
“Hotel companies are realizing that consumer searches on metasearch engines can result in enormous volumes of ‘shopping messages’, or requests for rates and availability data,” said DerbySoft’s Senior Vice President of Global Business, Keith Cotton. As a result of DerbySoft’s connectivity and caching service, Marriott’s proprietary CRS is buffered from large amounts of data requests from multiple travel metasearch engines, while allowing Marriott to capture more direct bookings.
Commenting on DerbySoft’s caching technology, Cotton noted, “The way we keep our hotel cache accurate and up to date is through our smart caching predictive analytics software, which uses our proprietary algorithms to optimize how often we need to update the cache of hotel rates and availability information.”
DerbySoft’s proprietary smart cache system analyzes historical booking patterns and rate changes, and interrogates shopping message results in order to determine how often it needs to query its hotel customers’ CRSs for rate and availability updates.
“For example, if 80% of our CRS queries indicate the hotel rate hasn’t changed, our smart cache software will automatically adjust the query schedule to send fewer query messages for that hotel for that particular period, and the system will continue to get smarter as time goes on,” Cotton said. As a result, DerbySoft’s smart cache system minimizes the peak-hour traffic volumes to Marriott’s CRS while maintaining high data accuracy and fast response times. “Consumers won’t notice the difference. In fact, the response times they experience may be shorter,” Cotton noted.
Marriott International, Inc. (NYSE: MAR) is a leading lodging company based in Bethesda, Maryland, USA, with more than 3,800 properties in 74 countries and territories and reported revenues of nearly $12 billion in fiscal year 2012. The company operates and franchises hotels and licenses vacation ownership resorts under 18 brands. www.marriott.com
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