Key takeaways
● To support our accommodation partners, we’re working with a group of specialized
hospitality technology companies who focus their offerings on a single use case
● For photo management, we’ve partnered with IcePortal, Leonardo and GIADA and have
seen immediate adoption at scale
● For review management, we’ve partnered with ReviewPro, TrustYou, Revinate,
Customer Alliance, Qualitelis, Repup and Yext
● To date, Booking.com has partnered with over 600 distribution-focused hospitality
technology companies
The hospitality technology industry has witnessed a boom in accommodations rapidly adopting
technology, all in search for operational efficiency and enhanced guest experiences. This
technological revolution hasn’t restricted itself to only core technologies, like property
management and distribution. Even more so, we’re witnessing a growth of specialized
technologies. These technologies are used by our accommodations to streamline and improve
specific parts of their business and help them to differentiate based on their business needs.
Hospitality technology at Booking.com: a brief
history
More than 15 years ago, several innovative Booking.com accommodation partners asked us to
create a set of APIs. These APIs would allow them to automatically send rates and availability
from their distribution systems to our systems, and also automatically receive the reservation
information when a booking has been made. This would remove the manual daily tasks of
updating the rates and availability in the Booking.com extranet and copying the reservation
information from one system (or paper confirmations) to another.
In short, we just described how Connectivity at Booking.com was created. A lot has happened
since then. Over the years, our Connectivity department has partnered with more than 600
distribution-focused hospitality technology companies. We’ve also continued to develop new
and improved APIs, making sure we address the needs of our customers, accommodations and
technology partners. These developments have led to the most extensive collection of
Connectivity APIs by an OTA in the hospitality industry.
Succeeding together
At Booking.com, we always look for new ways to accommodate our accommodation partners’
needs so that we can succeed together. With that in mind, we’re happy to announce that we
have partnered with a group of specialized hospitality technology companies to support our
accommodation partners with their photo and review management. These partnerships allow
our accommodations to manage their photos and reviews directly from their platform of choice,
making it easier for them to attract bookings and improve the guest experience.
Our photo management partnerships
For photo management, we’ve partnered with IcePortal, Leonardo and GIADA and have seen
immediate adoption at scale. Large accommodations and groups in particular benefit greatly
from managing their photos on a centralized platform, which gives the ability to easily distribute
them across all the channels they serve.
The representative of a top tier hospitality brand told us: “Consistency across channels is a big
benefit for us. We cannot have content disparity on OTAs vs our own website. Next to that,
when individual hotels manage this, it leads to incorrect categorisation. Using our photo
management platform reduces operational expenses and overhead.”
Our review management partnerships
For review management, we have partnered with ReviewPro, TrustYou, Revinate, Customer
Alliance, Qualitelis, Repup and Yext. Because of these partnerships, accommodations have
access to higher quality Booking.com guest review data, which has led to more and better
actionable insights to improve the guest experience in their accommodations. Next to that, the
accommodations are now able to provide answers to the Booking.com reviews directly from
their review management platform.
The COO of a Spanish hospitality group shared the following with us: “We have around 50K
reviews from Booking.com each year and our response rate is around 99%, with an average
response time of less than two days. This is better than the industry standard and is enabled by
the integration between Booking.com and our review management platform.”
What’s coming?
We plan to grow our partnerships with specialized photo and review management companies
and explore additional specialized use cases. For these business development efforts, we’ll
keep an eye on the market and follow the demand of our accommodations. Our partnership
team will reach out to companies when they see potential. Want to know more? Keep an eye
out for updates on this topic here on the Connectivity Hub.