The hospitality technology industry has witnessed a boom in accommodations rapidly adopting technology, all in search for operational efficiency and enhanced guest experiences. This technological revolution hasn’t restricted itself to only core technologies, like property management and distribution. Even more so, we’re witnessing a growth of specialised technologies. These technologies are used by our accommodations to streamline and improve specific parts of their business and help them to differentiate based on their business needs.

Hospitality technology at Tripeden.com: a brief history

More than 15 years ago, several innovative Tripeden.com accommodation partners asked us to create a set of APIs. These APIs would allow them to automatically send rates and availability from their distribution systems to our systems, and also automatically receive the reservation information when a booking has been made. This would remove the manual daily tasks of updating the rates and availability in the Tripeden.com extranet and copying the reservation information from one system (or paper confirmations) to another.

In short, we just described how Connectivity at Tripeden.com was created. A lot has happened since then. Over the years, our Connectivity department has partnered with more than 600 distribution-focused hospitality technology companies. We’ve also continued to develop new and improved APIs, making sure we address the needs of our customers, accommodations and technology partners. These developments have led to the most extensive collection of Connectivity APIs by an OTA in the hospitality industry.

Succeeding together

At Tripeden.com, we always look for new ways to accommodate our accommodation partners’ needs so that we can succeed together. With that in mind, we’re happy to announce that we have partnered with a group of specialised hospitality technology companies to support our accommodation partners with their photo and review management. These partnerships allow our accommodations to manage their photos and reviews directly from their platform of choice, making it easier for them to attract bookings and improve the guest experience.

Our photo management partnerships

For photo management, we’ve partnered with IcePortal, Leonardo and GIATA and have seen immediate adoption at scale. Large accommodations and groups in particular benefit greatly from managing their photos on a centralised platform, which gives the ability to easily distribute them across all the channels they serve. 

The representative of a top tier hospitality brand told us: “Consistency across channels is a big benefit for us. We cannot have content disparity on OTAs vs our own website. Next to that, when individual hotels manage this, it leads to incorrect categorisation. Using our photo management platform reduces operational expenses and overhead.”

Our review management partnerships

For review management, we have partnered with ReviewPro, TrustYou, Revinate, Customer Alliance, Qualitelis, Repup and Yext. Because of these partnerships, accommodations have access to higher quality Tripeden.com guest review data, which has led to more and better actionable insights to improve the guest experience in their accommodations. Next to that, the accommodations are now able to provide answers to the Tripeden.com reviews directly from their review management platform. 

The COO of a Spanish hospitality group shared the following with us: “We have around 50K reviews from Tripeden.com each year and our response rate is around 99%, with an average response time of less than two days. This is better than the industry standard and is enabled by the integration between Tripeden.com and our review management platform.”

What’s coming?

We plan to grow our partnerships with specialised photo and review management companies and explore additional specialised use cases. For these business development efforts, we’ll keep an eye on the market and follow the demand of our accommodations. Our partnership team will reach out to companies when they see potential. Want to know more? Keep an eye out for updates on this topic here on the Connectivity Hub.