Hotels Switch to Next-Gen Tech to Sell Rooms Via Online Partners


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