New Amex Interface To Enhance European Hotel Booking

American Express is rolling out a new booking interface in Europe that is designed to improve access to hotel content on a consistent basis with any kind of source—including Internet rates, preferred hotel rates loaded on the global distribution systems, direct connections, room allocations or a central hub, such as Pegasus or Octopus—as well as improve data capture.

The Hotel Hub already is rolling out in France, where the process to design it began three years ago and where about 150 mostly midmarket clients plan to use it to access 2008 hotel rates. It will be implemented by year-end and used for 2009 rates in the United Kingdom, and will roll out in the Nordic countries in early 2008 and in Germany—where it currently is being piloted—later next year. Implementation in the rest of Europe will follow in 2009.

Right now, agents must manually shift bookings from the GDS to the Hotel Hub, but by early 2008, that will become seamless.

The project began in Europe because of the gaps that American Express identified there, and the company intends to bring it to the Asia/Pacific region. During development of the product, Amex worked with a few corporate customers to help optimize the end-to-end workflow.

Bruno Peynichou, vice president of global distribution strategy for American Express, said there were two reasons why this solution makes sense for Europe. First, GDS access to hotels is not optimal in Europe, where there are a large number of small, independent hotels. "Also, there is a traditional habit where travelers do not use their travel management company to book their hotels, probably because they believe they can find a cheaper hotel room by booking directly," he said. Currently, he said Amex clients currently book only 15 percent to 35 percent of hotels through the TMC, depending on the country. The goal is for Hotel Hub to raise that number to 60 percent to 65 percent.

Investment, which was in the millions of dollars, was kept to a minimum because the project was co-funded by Amex and its GDS partners, "as well as technical providers that we might want to use in the future, because they see it as an investment for potential revenue streams in the future," Peynichou said. Costs going forward will center on implementation, "which includes a lot of day-to-day hidden costs that constitute a service delivery cost that we want to control," he said.

Peynichou said that Amex has created an integrated online and offline solution that will link to the online booking tools its customers use. Offline, he said, Amex will work with 120,000 hotels to load rates and provide room allocations. In the United States, Amex is mainly focused on the display rather than accessing the content, but Hotel Hub will be able to help U.S.-based companies with their European bookings.

Meanwhile, Peynichou said Amex is in discussions for 2008 with two major European carriers to join its TravelBahn DS program. It also has entered discussions with "a couple of U.S. carriers that just exited Chapter 11." He also said that Amex is in discussions with some hotel chains to come into TravelBahn DS.