Travel data technology supplier TRX this month released a
new version of its Hotel Name Normalization tool that it claims can match up to
99.5 percent of hotel data across the travel supply chain.
Like the previous version, the updated HNN tool uses
algorithms and language processing to consolidate hotel data across various
sources, including travel management companies, corporate cards and expense
tools. Hotel data often includes different names used for the same property: a
corporate card may identify one as the Downtown Westin, while a TMC might
identify the same property as the Westin Downtown, for example. This especially
can occur when travelers book hotels outside preferred tools or use personal
cards to pay their bill, said TRX senior vice president of business
intelligence and consulting services Tom Tulloch. The HNN tool consolidates
such instances into a single record.
On average, client hotel data includes about 20 percent or
30 percent of hotels that have non-matching identifiers, meaning corporate
travel buyers might not have the full picture when using data to determine preferred
hotels or provide usage numbers to suppliers, said TRX senior director of
product design and engineering Todd Kaiser. "You might not know that you
have a highly utilized property in a certain location. It could stimulate you
to include it in your request for proposals for your program or help you find
out why people are not staying at a preferred property. This can uncover those
types of scenarios."
Just acquired by Concur, TRX reported that the latest
version of the HNN tool improved its optimum yield by 9.5 percentage points
over the previous version. During testing with one corporate client, the tool
matched all but 49 transactions out of 40,000 hotel reservations, according to
TRX.
Although there have been industry efforts to create a
standard hotel identifier to improve data capabilities—the Travel Technology
Initiative and BTN parent company
Northstar Travel Media are among those that created unique hotel identifier systems—consolidating
hotel data will remain a challenge for buyers in the foreseeable future,
according to Kaiser.
"There's so much disparate information,"
he said. "If a client has 14 different TMCs throughout the world all with
different back office systems, to create a standard would be pretty
challenging."