5 reasons why your travel agency needs to use automatic room-type mapping today
What is room-type mapping?
As a travel agency in the 21st century, your suppliers can offer you an unprecedented number of offers at the click of a button. In addition, if you're a savvy agency, you are more than likely using multiple suppliers to get the best available prices and destinations for your customers. All these offers are great for you and, more importantly, your customers, who now have more choice than ever when booking their dream getaways. However, with the big-data age comes the big-headache job of sorting this data into something you can sell confidently to your customers.
Sorting through this data happens on multiple levels. The first step is normalizing or deduplicating the hotels, and it is no easy feat. Its an ongoing process that is managed both by alrogithms and a team of able bodied humans. A level down we have room-type mapping, which we fully automate. It’s a process where room-types are matched across all integrated suppliers, and grouped under what we call a Master Structure of room-type labels and codes. The end result is a clean, neat response that leaves little for the imagination.
Multiple suppliers with multiple ways of categorising their offers land on your computer screen. The seemingly endless variation in naming hotel rooms and the ever-increasing number of products available means that you can never be sure what you are selling to your customers unless you try to standardise the information. Doing this manually is a never-ending story and is likely driving your agents on the ground to pull out their hair in frustration.
So, let's take a look at the reasons why you should automate this process.
#1 - Your time is your money
Whether you are mapping manually or not mapping room types at all, it is likely to cost you a lot of time and, therefore, money.
Manually mapping rooms is a monumental task and is likely taking up too much of your employees' time, which can be spent serving your customers better. Suppose you are not yet mapping hotel rooms. In that case, you are probably wasting time on unnecessary customer service requests as your customers return from their holidays unhappy with the description of the product offered by your suppliers, or they are confused by the plethora of sometimes conflicting room-types and call in to ask what’s going on.
In both cases, automatic room-type mapping is the answer.
By automating the standardising of offers from multiple suppliers, you can free up your employees' precious time, allowing them to be more customer-focused and, in turn, build a reputation of quality and customer service for your agency. In addition, customer satisfaction will increase as you can be sure that you, and they, know precisely what is on offer from your suppliers. Most importantly: Mapping hotels, rooms and meals - is one of the features of the Resfinity Platform that customers receive as standard. So you don't have to look for a provider who will remove duplicates from the data pipeline you receive from suppliers. Resfinity will take care of that, ideally, the best in the market. Quickly, in an unbeatable way and at an unbeatable price - free of charge. Isn't the world a beautiful place?
#2 - Keeping up with the Kardashians
The biggest names in the travel industry have already switched to automatic room-type mapping. Can you afford not to?
If you are still manually mapping rooms, or worse yet, you haven't even started, you are putting your agency at a considerable disadvantage in the market. In other words, you are bringing a horse to a Formula 1 race; you need a new engine!
Competition from regional and international agencies is intense. So don't be left behind. The benefits of automating the process can allow you to focus on increasing your market share, and which travel agency doesn't want that?
#3 - Find your perfect match
Automatic room-type mapping is now a standard in the travel industry. Many variations of this service exist, but are they all doing the same thing?
The short answer to that is no. Many automatic room-type mapping services provide the bare minimum. You might receive offers after deduplication, and perhaps they have standardized room types. But why stop there?
When using Resfinity, the scope of mapping goes deeper, way deeper. You can expect offers with standardized attributes, including room views and facilities. Your customers will know exactly what they're getting and, therefore, be more satisfied, and you’ll have to deal with less complaints.
#4 - Say goodbye to duplicate offers
When searching for hotels from multiple suppliers, you will get duplicate offers. It's an unavoidable part of searching for hotel offers. Or is it?
When you take advantage of automatic room-type mapping, one of the most potent advantages is that you are presented with all of the available offers from your suppliers for any hotel under one easy-to-read offer.
The duplicate offers are aggregated and arranged to show which supplier offers the room at the lowest price. Alternatively, using a more powerful automatic room-type mapping service like Resfinity, you can prioritize which suppliers you see based on country, city and even at hotel level. This gives you new levels of control over how your business operates and interacts with its suppliers in your most popular destinations.
#5 - It's easier than you think
The benefits are clear, and you want to start automatic room-type mapping today, but you don't have the know-how to create such a system.
Don't reinvent the wheel; these cutting-edge solutions are already here and waiting to simply plug into your current business operations. With Resfinity, you can trust the experience of a dedicated integration team to make the transition into the 21st century.
So, what are you waiting for? Contact ANIXE today to learn more about how automatic room-type mapping can unlock the hidden potential of your travel agency.
Automatic room-type mapping is just one of the many intelligent tools available with Resfinity. For a complete list of products, contact our sales team.
.