Meetings technology provider Bizly has partnered with corporate travel reshopping platform Tripbam to offer detailed market rate information for small and simple meetings on Bizly's platform, the company told BTN Wednesday.
The collaboration, which the companies teased last month during BTN's annual Innovate in New York, will allow Bizly customers access to average market rate, average corporate booked rate and average corporate negotiated rate for more than 100,000 hotels worldwide, provided by Tripbam. This data will be included for all paid customers of the Bizly platform at no additional cost, Bizly CEO Ron Shah told BTN.
As part of this partnership, however, "Bizly will offer customers a paid service to truly benchmark their meeting rates and use Tripbam data and Bizly's proprietary pricing intelligence data to drive true cost savings for meetings, for the first time in this space," Shah added.
Through this collaboration, Bizly customers can access Tripbam's real-time data on hotel rates, including market comps, to aid in their bidding process. Tripbam's data also will offer Bizly customers a more granular look into their budgets, improve the transparency of hotel pricing and enable planners to make "more strategic and cost-effective decisions" while booking, the companies said.
"Our work with customers over the years has demonstrated that access to real-time rate and benchmarking data can have a massive impact on company savings and efficient program management," Tripbam founder and CEO Steve Reynolds said in a statement.
Looking Ahead
"Our vision for this is to bring a clear sense of pricing to the meetings and events industry, which it has never had before," Shah said. "We want to create a world where customers can get a sense for price range before even having to do an RFP," he said, adding that the company aims to "power the meetings and events section of all major online booking tools."
Bizly anticipates the collaboration could evolve further. Potential opportunities with Tripbam include "a fee-based service, such as displaying each corporation's unique Tripbam data on the venue pages and any deeper corporate-specific integrations that leverage the Bizly/Tripbam connection such as data and [online booking tool] integrations and rooming list pickup reporting," Shah said. Considering room blocks of more than nine rooms require a signed contract, "there is less liquidity and ability to reshop [there], however, we expect opportunities for reshopping on smaller room blocks," Shah added.
Shah also suggested that, in the long term, hoteliers also may "appreciate" this level of price transparency as "a way of helping all parties be more knowledgeable and remove the friction and bottlenecks to bookings and growth."