Skift Take
It's taken years for hotels to adopt an array of new technologies and business practices to improve selling travel online. The metaphor is like shaking a bottle of ketchup. Little appears until a lot suddenly comes out. Similarly, hotel digital innovation may come rapidly after a long wait.
Integrating travel agencies and other resellers into hotel tech systems is traditionally time-consuming and costly. Several upstart tech companies say they've found a better way. Resellers of all sizes, including global online travel agency brands, are paying attention to the tech trend.
Exhibit A is Impala, a London startup that on Wednesday launched a software hub that's designed to more quickly integrate hotel systems with companies that resell travel (think regionally popular online travel agencies like Despegar or flash sale sites like Voyage Privé) — or that want to resell travel (think companies like Amazon, which already sells flights in India).
Impala is one of a few efforts to use next-generation technologies to simplify how hotels distribute their rooms. What all these efforts have in common is that they're taking advantage of several long-term trends that have only recently matured and been adopted by a critical mass of hotels.
For simplicity's sake, we'll focus on Impala as a representative example of the next wave of "middleware" tech — or tech that's more like a switchboard or public utility and less like a traditional distribution channel.
Impala has raised the most venture capital of its immediate peers, having last year raised $31 million across two rounds of funding.
It's possible Impala may turn out to be just a flash in the pan. Most startups fail, after all.
But Impala serves a useful purpose today to talk about how technology may inevitably change today's strange commercial model for how hotels sell their rooms through third parties.
Toppling the Tower of Babel
"When I came into this sector, I was amazed at how screwy hotel distribution is," said Ben Stephenson, founder and CEO of Impala. "It's like the Tower of Babel."
"You've got a PMS [property management system], and then a channel manager's taking a cut of the booking, and then above that, a wholesaler is taking a cut, or an affiliate network is taking a cut, or a metasearch is taking a cut," Stephenson said. "Then the credit card or payments processor takes a cut and gives a kickback to one of the previous third-parties. It's an absolute nightmare."
Aiming to streamline this, Impala launched on Wednesday its self-service product that lets any business resell hotel rooms. Impala's next-generation connectivity hub comes programmed with the ability to speak to different systems. That removes the need for custom software configurations for both hotels
