TravelgateX Blog

"Over the past eight months, we’ve seen many parts of our technology industry rise up to help both hotels and travel technology providers to better understand new and emerging trends, as they happened. I’m proud to say that SiteMinder and TravelgateX are examples of this"

In this Interview, James Bishop, Senior Director, Global Demand Partnerships, SiteMinder, explains to us what his company's prospects are for next year 2021, in addition to analyzing what the learnings have been in this year of pandemic. James also explains what the collaboration between SiteMinder and TravelgateX is like within the technology and tourism sector.

- What are some of the biggest challenges for your sector right now?
- Through any time of frequent change, attempting to plan for a future that’s difficult to predict will always be the biggest challenge.  From the concern of not being ready for international and business travel when they recommence, to the threat of further government restrictions, accurately forecasting what’s next as a hotelier right now is a tricky prospect to navigate. With uncertainty comes the opportunity for growth, however, and one of the silver linings is that the industry has learnt the upsides of working in a more agile way. This time has also allowed the hotel sector to develop new revenue opportunities that are sure to benefit it into the future as well. 

“Technology is the key to innovate the travel industry”

Nezasa provides the technology to make hyper-personalised trip creation a reality. Its state of the art software is spearheading trip planning technology to guarantee its transition from static to live itineraries. It covers all aspects of the travel lifecycle with unprecedented speed and efficiency- from booking over in-destination experiences until the completion of the trip.

In this interview, Manuel Hilty, CEO of Nezasa explains how has the experience been for his company to be on collaboration and connectivity through TravelgateX. 

Tell us a little about. How did the business start, and how has it evolved over the years? 

From the beginning, Nezasa was all about making personalized travel packages simple to design, plan and book. Planning a trip is part of the holiday experience! But it has to be simple and inspirational. This in mind, Nezasa started the quest to bring this type of experience to the travel industry: not just for end consumers, but also for travel agencies. We set out to revolutionize the travel industry and to make hyper-personalised travelling and the so-called “connected trip” a reality. 

Can you describe the importance of two key factors to Nezasa development: technology... and customer service. 

Technology is the key to innovate the travel industry. We still see many manual processes which we think can be automated in a way that the tour operators and travel agencies can focus on what is the most important: the customer. The customer service is what enables technology to be integrated and set up easily and maintained to the full satisfaction of the customer.

Born in January 2019, Allbeds is the online hotel content distributor of a business group specialized in the Travel segment with the aim of complementing and diversifying the group's accommodation portfolio, and taking advantage of the existing synergies in the market due to the different mergers and acquisitions . With a total portfolio of 400,000 establishments available in more than 194 countries, the wide range of offerings of different types of accommodation and high availability online for the last minute coupled with highly competitive prices are Allbeds' main argument.

In this interview, Alex Pedret explains to us how they have had to redo their strategy after the pandemic and the new challenges for their company in the coming months. In addition, Alex explains how TravelgateX can help in your different projects thanks to connectivities.

- Has the crisis motivated Allbeds Travel to make internal or external changes?
- Definitely. COVID-19 made us take fast action by rethinking and redesigning our strategy and roadmap. We focused on strengthening the technical assets on which the company pivots, making an important investment on servers infrastructure and redesigning our processing engine, in order to be prepared for a more digitised environment, and ready to handle a higher and more complex demand than before the pandemic.

- What is your growth strategy post-COVID-19 and how is TravelgateX going to help you?
- Our growth strategy post-COVID-19 is already in place. Since weeks or even months ago, we started and resumed conversations looking for more synergies with similar business model partners. We continued increasing our direct inventory and added better tools, so we contribute to offer a product with added-value to a more demanding client, which requires a complete and easy point of sale, with efficient and more automated processes, and all this would not be possible without TravelgateX.

- TravelgateX is an essential technological partner in the tourism industry, especially in the hotel distribution niche. Many Allbeds’ team members already had the chance to work together with TGX in previous projects, and all of them highlighted the value of the system as a connection HUB between clients and providers for its stability and reliability.

- As a company, we do have ambitious plans to connect with many partners as clients, suppliers or both of them, but when it comes to widen our inventory, the focus will be initially LATAM and US, and Eastern Europe and APAC further on.

- We believe that the lesson is still half written. The confidence in this industry needs to be strengthened, there is a huge transformation and it is just the beginning. Technology is going to be the main value of differentiation in order to fulfill clients’ demands, so we need to be agile and listen carefully to the clients’ needs to keep them as the main actors of this complex but wonderful process. Every company on its niche can contribute with great solutions to the different existing models of distribution, and the new ones that will emerge.

- Every crisis brings new opportunities, and in this case, with the industry transformation, we can oversee new needs and visions that previously were not that obvious. On the one hand we are working every single day to improve existing products and services, and developing new ones. On the other hand, we are taking this opportunity to strengthen partnerships with suppliers and clients, and bringing them to the next level, so we are ready when demand comes back to normality.

- Firstly, and with no doubt the Artificial Intelligence, and then the standardization of the technology quality standards. This industry is already using AI, and working on many models of it, but we are convinced that this is nothing compared to what the industry can achieve. It will definitely allow us to generate more customer satisfaction by being more diligent and reactive, and at the same time improve the automation and profitability.

A sub second response time determines the success of a transaction.

“Over our 43 year history, ATI has navigated many crises, but none has been as profound and prolonged as the current pandemic. I personally think that you learn how strong partnerships really matter and the importance of diversification, both in terms of product and source markets”, this is one of the reflections of Nicholas Hentschel, COO AmericanTours International, one of the largest tourism companies, also partners of TravelgateX. In this interview, Nicholas Hentschel also defines the next strategies for the tourism of the future and the growth of the sector.