Developed to handle airline inventory, the GDS have evolved to tackle hotel and car rental, but they still don't cut the mustard when it comes to meetings and groups, says HRS.com's Todd Kramer

THE ORIGINS of the global distribution systems (GDS) date back over 50 years having originally been created by the airlines to make their inventory more accessible to travel agents. Over time the GDS have added content including, most notably, hotels and car rental.

Since there are only a few hundred major airlines, the GDS was a good way to centrally distribute the airlines' inventory and it also made sense for the major hotel chains because it was based on the same centralised (few-to-many) distribution concept. Today, the GDS has around 80,000 hotels in their database. But what about all of the independent hotels that aren’t in the GDS, and what about the meetings and groups (M&G) inventory that is available from both chains and independents?

The question that the hotels and corporate accounts are asking is, ’Can the GDS possibly be the system to effectively distribute the hotels’ M&G inventory?’ I believe the answer is no and I’ll try to explain why.

It’s taken HRS nearly 40 years to bring together our 250,000 hotels (both chain and independent) into our database and we’ve got over 100 people (spread across the world) that are dedicated to working with all of these hotels on a daily basis.

The M&G inventory is very complex because it is not just a room, but conference rooms (potentially with overnight accommodation) along with day delegate rates, and hotels want and need the flexibility to yield manage their inventory. Generally, none of the M&G inventory is managed centrally and very often it’s a manual process. Because of all these differences, it would be very difficult to distribute this type of inventory through the traditional GDS model.

First of all, there are many indepen-dent hotels with great M&G facilities and if the GDS does not have these hotels in their database, they obviously cannot distribute the hotels’ M&G inventory. Secondly, the hotels’ M&G inventory is not normally managed by the system and it is very often done on an ad hoc basis. Therefore there is no way to get the information uploaded into the GDS.

The best model to distribute M&G inventory must be based on the many-to-many concept, meaning that each and every M&G hotel must have the ability to load and manage their inventory into a system whereby it is immediately available to all of its clients from a global perspective.

That’s where a hotel portal like HRS can help. We provide hotels a secure logon to an extranet where they can load their M&G inventory in real-time that then allows corporate customers to use the system to actually book the appropriate conference rooms and/or bedrooms, on-line, in real-time. In addition, we also have direct connections with all of the major hotel chains and therefore can show their M&G inventory too (assuming that this is managed as part of their system).

When it comes to M&G, we need to keep in mind the ’lowest common denominator’ and, in this case, it is the independent hotels. By giving the independent hotels a common platform they’ll be able to compete with the large chains and have a much more level playing field. At the same time, providing a many-to-many distribution platform, the corporate accounts are able to take advantage of better choice and more competitive prices. Therefore it’s a win-win for all the players.

BACK