Hotel Intermediaries

Say Goodnight to Inflexible Hotel Sourcing

Hotel Connectivity – an industry commentary from OpenJaw

“Our vision for the industry is one where the standard business model involves optimising revenue through the right combination of locally held allocations and externally sourced inventory from multiple sources. As the hotel distribution model evolves, we see the growing requirement for flexibility to support different inventory models and rate types including: retail rates and discounted Best Available Rates direct from hotel chains; local allocations, and net or merchant rates from intermediaries. xHotel 2.0 has been designed from the ground up with our vision in mind and integrates with our other products to allow the Dynamic Packaging of accommodation with transport and events or destination activities.”
John Lambe
CTO of OpenJaw Technologies & Vice-Chairman of the OpenTravel™ Board of Directors

At a glance

  • XML standards based middleware platform
  • Provides connectivity to multiple inventory sources including Global Distribution Systems, hotel switches and hotel CRS’s
  • xRez Internet Booking Engine provides unrivalled flexibility to deliver innovative hotel booking capability using advanced search options
  • For flexible searching against hotel data from multiple sources, OpenJaw can also provide a searchable hotel content database with import applications for many hotel switch data formats

xDistributor

Manage and aggregate inventory from multiple Hotel inventory sources using the industry’s most advanced XML standards based technology. Simultaneous search against systems including:

  • Hotel Switches
  • Global Distribution Systems
  • Hotel CRS’s
  • Hotel websites

xDistributor provides a single OpenTravel™ Alliance XML interface to any combination of these systems. OpenJaw’s advanced business rules engine controls which suppliers receive particular requests, how the responses are aggregated and other business logic functions including sorting, filtering, removing duplicates, applying markups or discounts.

xDistributor provides the capability to ‘burst’ multiple requests in parallel against each supplier system, with business rules determining the options in each request. This allows large amounts of data to be gathered to support availability checking for multiple properties, or to drive additional search requests when too few hotels are found for the users exact search criteria.

xRez

xRez delivers the future technology for hotel travel websites. The combination of XML based architecture, advanced customer-centric features and unrivalled flexibility provides a platform to grow your business and adapt quickly to changing market requirements.

Search Options

xRez offers multiple search types to allow accurate matching of customer needs:
Geo Search – find hotels within a given radius of a particular search point. Within a large city, allow the user to choose multiple city areas.
Search by Address – enter an address and find hotels within a given radius of that address.
Search near airport or city- enter an airport code or city name and allow the user to find hotels nearby.

Sort Options

To better meet customer needs, xRez allows search results to be displayed using multiple sort criteria:
Sort by Distance – order hotels by distance from the search origin, showing the distance in miles or kilometres from the search point
Sort by Price – By utilising xDistributor’s bursting capability, accurate rates can be retrieved for multiple properties. These results can then be sorted by price.
Sort by Hotel Name, Rating or other criteria – sorting based on any bodycopy information available for each hotel

Mapping Support Service

xRez supports integration with mapping services to display interactive maps showing one or multiple hotel locations.

Standards

xRez supports the travel industry XML specifications developed by the OpenTravel™ Alliance for Air, Car and Hotel searching and reservations. Other XML formats can also be supported on request.

Architecture

xRez is part of OpenJaw’s end-to-end XML product suite for travel distribution. It fully leverages the capabilities of the latest Java, XML and Web Services technologies. The xRez architecture is highly scalable and fault tolerant and can be deployed on Windows, Linux, Unix or Solaris.

Content Database

In many cases, a local database containing hotel location and descriptive information is desirable for advanced search and content management purposes. Most hotel switches and many other providers allow downloading of descriptive content for their supported hotels. This allows the website owner to manage and update hotel information to ensure consistent display of content from multiple sources, translate data where required and allow searching and filtering of hotels based on any content in the database.

An OTA XML interface for searching and retrieving descriptive content from the database is provided.