HRS and Altour have
signed a strategic agreement that would allow Altour agents and corporate
clients to access HRS's worldwide inventory. The rates that HRS negotiates on
behalf of clients already are available to travel management companies through
global distribution systems, application program interfaces for TMC hotel
platforms and online booking tools. But the agreement with Altour is different,
and a first for HRS; it gives the TMC access to hotel rates at properties that
don't typically participate in traditional booking channels or that cannot be
loaded into the GDSs.
"It's only a subset of our entire
inventory that we've put into the GDSs," said Jason Long, VP of
partnerships for HRS. "[Altour] can use and consume our entire inventory, all
of HRS' negotiated rates, either through the [agent] portal or through the
connects that we have with online booking tools from Concur, GetThere, Amadeus,
Deem."
HRS has more than
350,000 hotels in its system, but only about two-thirds are independent. Which
is to say, many of the properties with which HRS has corporate negotiated rates
are chain hotels that are already participating in the GDSs. Until now, Altour
hasn't been able to access negotiated rates at those chain hotels because HRS
isn't allowed to load those rates into the GDSs.
"It seems to
me that one of the big pillars of managing travel going forward is content,"
said Altour COO & EVP Barry Noskeau. "That huge subset of [HRS] content that is available
through the portal and not through the GDS is really important to us."
Noskeau said many corporates struggle to keep travelers in a program because of
the gap that exists between rates available in online booking tools and on
consumer booking sites. "We've got to fill that gap to be relevant."
The arrangement
also enables Altour potentially to leverage HRS's global sourcing network to
fill gaps for its own clients. "If there was an Altour client that was
struggling to find hotels around a new manufacturing facility in a remote
country," Long explained, "we could send our local guys out, find a
hotel, negotiate with that hotel to bring it into our system and therefore make
it bookable by Altour."
Long said HRS is open to
closer working relationships with TMCs, and the company anticipates growth in
that regard in 2017 and beyond. "As HRS has expanded its global footprint,
more TMCs have engaged with us," he said, "not only on content issues
but also on topics like sourcing, meetings and automated payment options."
Long said the limited resources available to TMCs to serve clients expanding
into primary and secondary markets globally, as well as the burden for those
TMCs to use multiple technology systems to serve clients, present an
opportunity for HRS to extend a TMC's reach.