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hotel.info, the free online hotel reservation service with more than 210,000 hotels worldwide, has expanded its corporate application: If an agent books within the individual hotel.info corporate application a passive segment for a PNR – Passenger Name Record* will automatically be created. This new feature will further increase the opportunity to optimise travel management for travel agencies that book for companies with many travellers.
Generally agents can only have a GDS (Global Distribution System) available for booking flights, hire cars and hotels. This has the advantage of combining all details of the travellers in the company booking system through the PNR and thus these are internally always available. However the agent is limited in respect of hotels when utilising the GDS: very many small hotels run by their owners which offer more favourable room rates and which are often much closer to the traveller’s destination cannot be found. Furthermore a GDS does not feature the important Best Price Guarantee relevant to all hotels.
Should a travel agent wish to make a reservation outside the possibilities offered by the GDS then it involves a great deal of extra work: In order that the booking details are linked with all the other relevant details of the trip they have to be entered manually in the GDS as a so-called passive PNR, which considerably lengthens the processing time for the travel agency.
By means of the new facility offered by hotel.info a “passive segment” can be created within every corporate application after completion of the booking which is automatically transmitted to the GDS. This means that travel agents can now take advantage of a larger hotel offer without significantly increasing the processing time. Companies and travel agencies who wish to make the booking process fully automatic can utilise the interfaces provided by hotel.info, free of charge, and can transfer all booking details to the back office systems of their agency.
Warini Munshi, Managing Director of hotel.info, emphasised the advantages to travel agencies and their customers of both using these free interfaces and the automatic generation of the passive segments: “As the passive segment is now available straight after the hotel booking has been made, no extra process costs are incurred by the travel agency as previously when an agent had to enter data manually after making a booking in an external system. Apart from this they now have access to a very wide hotel offer and to the many different types of rate offered by hotel.info. This permits our booking customers to make further savings when booking through hotel.info without incurring any extra cost for travel agencies.”
Using the passive segment all relevant booking details are transmitted to the travel agency. Travel agencies can then save and process the information in their GDS and combine it with other services such as flights and car rental. Should any cancellation be made the travel agency will be informed that there are other parts of the same booking which are still shown as reserved in the system.
Vicky is the co-founder of TravelDailyNews Media Network where she is the Editor-in Chief. She is also responsible for the daily operation and the financial policy. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Tourism Business Administration from the Technical University of Athens and a Master in Business Administration (MBA) from the University of Wales. She has many years of both academic and industrial experience within the travel industry. She has written/edited numerous articles in various tourism magazines.
