Seven of the top ten global hotel groups were in attendance at DerbySoft’s second Advisory Forum held in Dallas Texas, April 21 and 22. DerbySoft’s founders, lead engineers, and key executives and support personnel welcomed the more than 50 representatives from hotels, channels, and 3rd party partners for two days of sessions covering DerbySoft’s current state as well as some of its future-facing initiatives, including its TotalContent and Customer Portals Service, which were both very interested by the audiences.
DerbySoft also invited a few key demand partners to make presentations to the audience regarding their current and future efforts—Booking.com, Google, HRS, GTA and Expedia offered their respective insights and updates.
After the two days intensive meetings, a series of pre-scheduled meetings between various partners enabled frank discussions about how to improve specific connections and solved the existing problems and challenges face by face between the engineers’ teams.
“It was the second time that we held our Advisory Forum that was a great opportunity for us to meet our customers and partners, listen to them, discuss with them and work together with them to face the challenges and problems, and then solve the problems. We would like to continue to hold this conference every 18 months in the future in order to communicate more with our customers and partners and to add value to the whole hotel industry all together.” said Ted Zhang, DerbySoft’s CEO and co-founder.
DerbySoft was very gratified that each hotel group and partners not only participated, but sent as many representatives as they did, and without our customers and partners’ support, the meeting couldn’t be held as successful as it was.
If the ultimate objective is to get more bookings at a reasonable cost, then we should embrace this change. Metasearch is no longer just a marketing channel, nor is it simply an OTA type of distribution channel. Perhaps it should be called a direct distribution-marketing channel, through which you can get bookings from direct customers on your branded site or app?
