Business Need

Hotels need to update their rates and availability with many OTA’s to bring in business. Each hotel will be sharing their details with many OTAs like Last minute, Orbitz, Global Hotels, Desiya, Make my trip, Rates to Go, CentralR, In1 Solutions, Gulliver etc. Hotels need to push their rates and availability to these OTA’s and then pull in the booking details provided by the OTA’s to their system for steady business.

The Client

AccuBook is a Travel technology company based out of Ireland. AccuBook is a supplier of internet tools to the hotel industry including booking engines, inventory distribution, websites and online solutions. Teknokraaft has been working with them to provide better solutions to their clients.

The Challenge

The main challenge for the Hotels is that each day the Hotel’s Reservation manager have to login into each OTA to update the rates and availability of corresponding rooms. They also need to pull back the booking details provided by the OTA and update their own inventory. This is all done manually and this affects the productivity of the system

The Solution

It would be great if there is a tool that would update the rates and availability of all OTA’s that have link with the hotel, so that hotels reservation manager have to login into only one Booking engine (Source engine) that would update the rates and availabilities of rooms in the OTA’ corresponding to the changes made by reservation Manger in the Booking Engine (Source engine). We have created plugins of OTA to achieve this. Plugins for Updating Rates and Availability The main objective of this plugin is that without the need of a web browser and without any human interaction it would automatically use the username and password and log in to OTA and make the changes in the rates and availability of rooms. The logic of each plugin would be specific to each OTA. When the Reservation manager comes and makes some changes in the Booking engine (Source engine) the Plugin reads the changes from the source and automatically log in to the OTA’s (using screen Scrapping) and update the rates and availabilities to all OTAs that have link with the hotel. Plugins for Booking Retrieval

When a booking is made in the OTA, the plugin will log into the OTA and read the bookings. The plugin will also update the availability of the source corresponding to the bookings made for the room in OTA. This plugin is set to run in regular intervals of time so that no bookings will be missed.

The project was very challenging because of the following reasons.

• Some Hotel Web services uses HTTP GET/POST methods and some are using a direct Web method call.
• Request and response of each Hotel webservices are entirely different. Some are using XML request & response and some are using Proxy objects as request & response.
• Input and output structure of each Hotel webservice is different.
• Some Hotel web services are having Post-paid Hotels and some are having pre-paid
• Each of the web services has their own standards and structures
• The end product should be a Scalable, reliable model that should be able to handle growth in traffic and data.
• The client wants a Selection and switching mechanism between different hotel webservice providers.

OTA Hotel Engine

The Hotel part in OTA engine is capable of handling the response from different hotel webservices. The OTA Engine can handle multiple hotel Webservice communication. The different web service translator components’ translates the response from each webservice and converts it into OTA Engine standards. This makes it very easy to integrate a new hotel webservice to the application within a minimum time.