Following dramatic changes in numbers of traveller and recession, as well as increased competition due to the consolidation of some major OTAs, more hotel chains around the world are focusing upon customer research in detail. Absolute Hotel Services Group, who operate properties throughout Southeast Asia and the Middle East, are one such chain seeking to understand the wants and needs of their guests on a more personal level. Absolute Hotel has choosen to partner with eRevMax, making use of RateTiger Corp solution to keep tabs on the competition and deeply analyse room rate trends. Absolute CEO Jonathan Wigley reports that RateTiger Corp is the best way of ‘understanding our customers and the challenges they face’.
Come Monday and one of the biggest Business Travel events will kick off in Boston, Massachusetts. With two former US Presidents featuring as key speakers among the biggies of the travel industry, there is surely some exciting time ahead!
With over 1400 pre-registered buyers, the 2012 GBTA Convention will have the largest buyer attendance in its 44 year history, which speaks volumes about the show. The agenda looks well-defined and with huge cuts on global business travel budgets, we can expect to witness hot discussions and debates on ways to achieve more productivity.
How do we do that? Well with technology moving forward in leaps and bounds, there will be much to catch up on. And of course I will be there at the RateTiger stand 959 speaking to attendees on how they can leverage our tools to achieve ultimate rate transparency.
A recent PhoCusWright reportmentions how quickly corporate travel bookings are moving online, with over 56% of all business travel bookings to be made over the internet by 2013. The technology boom doubled with increase in mobile and tablet usage has converted corporate travelers into corporate tourists. Further with travel managers keeping a close check on online hotel rates, it has become difficult for hotels to disregard their corporate contracts and offer differential pricing.
New technology and software tools are expected to play an important role with TMCs experiencing increased pressure from companies to thoroughly assess and deliver returns from their travel spend. Corporates are defining stricter ROI metrics to ensure they get ‘more from less’when it comes to their money spent. Therefore buyers need to look at rates carefully and ensure they are getting the best deal – hence theimportance of rate shopping tools (aka RTCorp). Our corporate price management tool will give the transparency needed when negotiating RFPs with hotels.
I look forward to all the discussions and networking, as well as checking out what others in the business travel space are doing. Watch this space for updates when I am back from the show.
Jan Murza is Sales Manager – USA at eRevMax and is responsible for sale of RateTiger products in the region. He is based out of Orlando, USA and can be reached at janm@ratetiger.com
The recently concluded World Travel Market in ExCel London was a well organized show and one of the best in recent times. It provided good opportunities to visitors and exhibitors to do business as well as reach out to new contacts.
RateTiger was present in full force and most of our Sales Managers from across the globe descended upon London to witness this grand show. Below are excerpts from some of their feedback on the event –
Pilar Sanchez Aita, Sales Manager – Spain & Portugal says, “This year’s edition was excellent; it helped me further strengthen customer relations and gain new prospects. The main topics of my discussions revolved around new revenue trends such Flash sales (Groupon), Social Media booking engine, online distribution, the affect of the recession on Southern European markets for domestic travel, etc. RateTiger’s stand location was fantastic, which helped generate a lot of traffic.”
Ryan Haynes, VP – Global Marketing says, “This had to be the best show RateTiger has done in the 5 years of exhibiting at WTM. It was certainly the year for Technology and a year for Channel Management solutions with all global enterprises present and visible at the show. We had a busy four days and a very successful presentation on the second day delivered by Keith Povah.”
“As for the core discussions – Channel management, for the first time, was a key topic of conversation, while social media tried to reign supreme. Again the recent news and discussion surrounding TripAdvisor was not sitting well with hoteliers. Hotels are looking for tangible results from marketing and sales strategies and distribution was answering most of their questions. Many exhibitors were talking about RateTiger – some nice free marketing.”
Lilian Stjepanovic, Sales Manager – Eastern Europe quipped in, “The show was fantastic as I got to meet a lot of hoteliers from my region. Having the same stand location helps in the sense that most people know where to find us. Overall, a great show which makes a lot of business sense.”
Keith Watson, Division President – RTCorp concluded, “This year’s show was very successful. My team took the opportunity to setup many meetings with prospects we have been cultivating over the last 12 months. These went very well. We also met with some new potential customers, who liked what they saw in RTCorp. Our discussions focused around filtering shopped rates as well as better understanding price comparison websites.”
All in all, a grand show, very well organized and an event that will see RateTiger come back every year.
The Global Business Travel Association (GBTA) – the voice of the global business travel industry had a record breaking 2011 GBTA Convention in Denver, Colorado last month. Over 6,000 people attended the event, amongst which were 1,200 travel buyers, making this one of the largest GBTA Conventions in its history.
The RateTiger stand at the convention experienced a good show with a large number of pre-confirmed visits gaining a lot of interest among travel buyers. The main topics of discussion revolved around identifying how real-time hotel rate benchmarking can best benefit the corporate travel market and the individual corporate travel manager.
Travel managers mostly use historical rate data for price-comparison; but they know that real-time benchmarking will take the industry to a new level, which led to their added interest in RTCorp. This product fulfills two main areas of demand for the corporate travel managers – (a) To show supervisors how their negotiated hotel rate compares against publicly available rates on the internet to support their negotiations; (b) To provide corporate travel managers with email alerts that identify future instances where the publicly available rates may be cheaper than their negotiated rates and therefore provide them with the opportunity to renegotiate with those hotels in advance of their travelers booking their travel. In addition corporate travel managers are looking for a tool that audits their negotiated rates and availability across their chosen GDS.
Another point of interest for us was RateTiger’s nomination for the GBTA Travel Innovation Award 2011 under the Travel Management category. This was very encouraging for us given that RTCorp was launched to the corporate travel segment only recently. We look forward to coming back to the GBTA convention next year for many more productive discussions and yet another meaningful show.
Mark Neter is the Sales Manager for RTCorp. He is based out of Orlando, Florida and can be reached at markn@ratetiger.com
This year’s edition of HITEC, the world’s largest hospitality technology exposition and conference, took place in Austin, Texas. We attended the four day event and made the most of it. Having had our stand in one of the main sections helped us meet a lot of people.
HITEC is a combination of hospitality technology education, led by industry peers and experts, and a trade show showcasing the latest hospitality technology products and services.
The event offers us a B2B platform that introduces us to new contacts for our various product lines. This is our chance to present our powerful back-end tools for vendors and large hotel chains, RTCorp and RTConnect, though it amazes me how much of the industry is playing catch-up with new business revenue models through the internet.
Tradeshows like these provide us an opportunity to see how customers and the industry in general perceive RateTiger. We always get to hear good reviews and appreciation, which further encourages us to innovate and develop new features and products to serve the sector better.
Gerard Carrie is VP Sales – Americas at eRevMax. He is based out of Florida, USA and can be reached at gerardc@ratetiger.com
RateTiger’s, RTCorp, has been recognised by the travel industry just one year after launching in the market. The rate shopping technology has been nominated for the Business Traveler Innovation Award within the Travel Management category.
RTCorp helps monitor hotel rates in the public market in both real-time and via scheduled reports. The technology sends automated alerts that filters hotel-pricing data into exception information and delivers it to the appropriate manager to action.
This helps corporate buyers, travel websites and hotel companies monitor violations or discrepancies in room rates while providing intelligent rate shopping data to better understand the market.
Following dramatic changes in numbers of traveller and recession, as well as increased competition due to the consolidation of some major OTAs, more hotel chains around the world are focusing upon customer research in detail. Absolute Hotel Services Group, who operate properties throughout Southeast Asia and the Middle East, are one such chain seeking to understand the wants and needs of their guests on a more personal level. Absolute Hotel has choosen to partner with eRevMax, making use of RateTiger Corp solution to keep tabs on the competition and deeply analyse room rate trends. Absolute CEO Jonathan Wigley reports that RateTiger Corp is the best way of ‘understanding our customers and the challenges they face’.
