Skift Take
DHISCO boss Toni Portmann said the hotel distribution tech company has completely modernized its formerly limited and failure-prone system. But we're still waiting to see a wave of new contract announcements, including for alternative lodging providers.
If you've ever searched for hotels through one of the major U.S.-headquartered online travel agencies, the results you saw were most likely provided with back-end technology assistance from a small Dallas-based company, DHISCO, which stands for the Distribution Hospitality Intelligent Systems Co.
DHISCO is known to many hoteliers simply as "the switch," an outsourced partner that helps hotels distribute their inventory and process transactions across various platforms worldwide.
Today, it makes 107,241 properties available for distribution via 127 travel agencies and online travel sites.
In other words, it makes the rates, availability, photos and descriptions of more than 11 million rooms at 453 hotel chains, including AccorHotels, InterContinental Hotels Group, Hilton, Hyatt, Marriott, and Scandic, easy to distribute technologically to online travel companies such as the ones owned by Expedia Inc. and the Priceline Group.
For example, if you search for a New York City hotel on Priceline.com and Marriott and Best Western properties get displayed, DHISCO is the company that enabled Priceline to search that room inventory for both chains. It fetched the rates, the inventory, the descriptive content, and the pictures.
DHISCO also works with Expedia and other companies, such as Cathay Pacific Holidays, which uses the back-end tech company to offer hotels to consumers.
A case in point: DHISCO is a significant tech partner for companies like InterContinental Hotels Group.
While it doesn't touch IHG's transactions that come through its "brand.com" direct channels, DHISCO does facilitate more than half of IHG's transactions that come through online travel agents, packagers, and wholesalers.
Since late 2014, the 85-employee business has been undergoing a turnaround under new CEO Toni Portmann.
DHISCO, which launched in 2014, traces its roots to Pegasus Solutions, which was founded in 1989. DHISCO was essentially the distribution division of Pegasus.
Pegasus fell on tough times during the 2008 recession. It had fallen behind on investing in its systems, resulting in those systems becoming brittle and prone to breaking.
The company was also distracted by trying to provide too many services to hotels and saw its various business face competition from rival hotel technology companies, such as DerbySoft, eRevMax, RateGain, SiteMinder, and TravelClick.
Some hotel groups began switching to other providers, or creating in-house solution
