Hotel reservations service Hotel.info has partnered with
business social networking sites to simplify the booking process for corporate
travelers, who account for about 60 percent of the company's business.
The company in recent weeks integrated LinkedIn with its
booking process, allowing members of the social networking site to create
profiles from their LinkedIn data, log in via their LinkedIn accounts and access
special corporate rates negotiated by Hotel.info, said chief marketing officer Ralf
Ahamer. About 30 percent of the 250,000 hotel properties available through the
platform offer corporate rate discounts, he said.
"LinkedIn has more than 200 million businesspeople on
their platform, so this helps us identify them and give them a very convenient
login," Ahamer said. "If we know a trip is business-related, we can
recommend different hotels, give more information about the hotels and shape [our
product] around the login data that makes it easier not only to book but decide
more quickly which hotel is best."
A few months earlier, Hotel.info developed a similar
integration with Xing, a social networking platform popular in the
German-speaking world.
According to Ahamer, the Hotel.info platform is used by
small and midsize companies that don't have their own negotiated hotel programs,
as well as some larger managed travel programs.