Amadeus and HRS enter strategic hotel distribution alliance

January 18, 2012 | Hotel Marketing

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By Q2 2012, Amadeus’ subscribers worldwide will benefit from integrated access to broader content with the addition of HRS’ 250,000 hotel properties, including more than 50,000 hotel properties which were distributed exclusively through HRS up to now.

Amadeus, a leading travel technology partner and transaction processor for the global travel and tourism industry, and HRS, the worldwide leading hotel portal for corporate customers, today announced a strategic alliance to distribute HRS’s hotel content through Amadeus. This is a milestone in HRS’ strategy as it is the first time the hotel portal will make its content available through a global distribution system.

Through this strategic partnership, which is a major step forward in Amadeus’ ‘Multisource’ hotel initiative to distribute hotel content from diverse sources, Amadeus will seamlessly integrate HRS’ database of around 250,000 hotel properties to its distribution system. This includes more than 50,000 independent hotel properties which were distributed exclusively through HRS up to now.

HRS, recognised as the worldwide leading hotel portal for corporate customers, offers business travellers a vast choice of hotels worldwide, with detailed and high quality shopping information in 32 languages, best price guarantee for all properties as well as flexible and customer-friendly booking conditions. By seamlessly integrating this standardised hotel content to Amadeus’ newly re-engineered hotel search and reservation system, Amadeus and HRS are responding to customers’ demands for efficient, integrated access to the most relevant hotel content. The integration of HRS hotel offers to Amadeus will eliminate labour-intensive, hotel shopping and servicing by bookers, who typically compare rates for the same hotel across multiple channels before booking. It also brings a vast new array of highly-demanded independent hotels to the GDS environment for the first time.

Tobias Ragge, Chief Executive Officer, HRS, commented “This strategic agreement with Amadeus is a key milestone in our multichannel strategy to offer our hotel partners extended, integrated distribution reach from a single source. By distributing our content through the GDS channel for the first time, we will make our hotel partners bookable through more than 91,000 travel agencies and over 65,000 airline sales offices, which use the Amadeus system worldwide. HRS’s integrated end-to-end solution, which connects independent properties directly with the GDS, helps to reduce our hotel partners’ distribution cost by 10 per cent compared to competing solutions. At the same time we respond to the demand from bookers worldwide to find our vast choice of independent hotels efficiently through Amadeus distribution solutions. Our corporate customers will benefit from higher adoption rates when it comes to hotel bookings, as their travel agency partners now have also access to more extensive hotel content.”

Amadeus has already started the integration of HRS’s content into its distribution system to make it as easy and efficient to book as any GDS content. By Q2 2012, corporations and travel agencies will have access to this content via both Amadeus e-Travel Management – the online self-booking tool used by 5,200 corporations worldwide – and Amadeus Selling Platform – the point of sale solution used by Amadeus travel agents for traditional servicing. This will allow them to shop for hotels from different sources – GDS and HRS, quickly and easy from a single screen and with the highest level of mid- and back office integration.

“HRS is the ideal partner to complement Amadeus’ current hotel proposition to bookers. Offering integrated access to HRS’ vast inventory of unique ‘non-GDS’ hotel offers via bookers’ preferred channels marks a milestone in our ‘Multisource’ strategy to bring new levels of efficiency to the fragmented hotel distribution space.” commented Francisco Pérez-Lozao, Vice President New Businesses, Amadeus. “This partnership with HRS reflects our shared absolute focus on the needs of our customers and we are thrilled with this boundary-breaking alliance.”

Yves Galimidi, Global Travel Purchaser, Indirect Material and Services (IMS), IKEA, commented “For Ikea, the Amadeus and HRS partnership is nothing but good news. It means we can find the best rooms for our travellers at the best price, without labour-intensive hotel shopping. The extensive additional choice of hotel properties mean all of Ikea’s unique, quickly-changing needs will be met. We are very pleased.”