Quality Reservations Case Study

Greater Online Visibility and Reach After Optimizing Distribution Channel with Sabre Hospitality Solutions

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Building a Story of Success for Quality Reservations

In today’s competitive travel space, providing an excellent guest experience during the hotel stay is no longer enough. Customers have access to an ever-increasing number of options for shopping and booking hotels. And more times than not, what a potential guest sees online at the beginning of their travel experience can make all the difference when it comes to selecting a hotel. In order to drive increased bookings, you need partners capable of optimizing your sales and your distribution — all with the right systems and processes in place, supported by a proven team of people who work efficiently with these systems on a daily basis.

“Quality Reservations is optimizing the online sales and distribution strategy for hotels within Europe. Online distribution is demanding, therefore we are constantly looking for new opportunities and technical solutions. One of them was connecting online with offline sales. We needed a strategic partner that had the ability and knowledge to leverage travelers’ shopping and booking preferences while offering greater international reach and found such a provider with Sabre Hospitality Solutions. All without losing the regional variations in customers’ preferences when maximizing online bookings for each of our hoteliers.”

Carolin Brauer, Managing Director Quality Reservations

The Quality Reservations Brand

Founded in 1996, Quality Reservations (QR) has been helping to unite hotels and travelers. Today sales and distribution experts at QR support 280 unique hotel properties primarily located in Germany as well as other locations throughout Europe. As a consulting partner, they have built a long-standing reputation for its keen focus on developing irresistible offers aimed at the right target customer group for each individual hotel property. Additionally, QR works with hotel properties to optimize the interfaces between the human and automated processes in a concerted effort to strengthen revenue and bookings. ATLANTIC Hotels, Ghotel & Living, Infinity Hotel & Conference Resort in Munich and the Novum Hospitality Group are only a few of their customers.

Business Challenges Facing QR Beyond Germany and Europe

QR wanted to grow business and better promote their 280 hotel properties in a highly competitive global marketplace. However, they were confronted by two major challenges many hoteliers experience:

• Limited distribution channels or international reach
• Insufficient growth in online bookings outside their region

With 7.2 billion people in 195 countries on five continents, QR and its hotel partners recognized a huge untapped market for greater online bookings. They also realized that the solution they had in place wasn’t effectively taking advantage of all the distribution opportunities in the market, especially connecting to global OTAs (Booking.com, Ctrip, Expedia, and others). Their central distribution primarily served travel agencies and didn’t fully exploit today’s Internet Distribution System (IDS) while its Global Distribution System (GDS) had limited reach. In addition, there was an urge to connect online distribution systems with the individual property management systems PMS in the hotels. Reservation business is shifting into the online world and there was a fast need to act accordingly. In addition, the team felt they had outgrown their technology and were not well positioned going forward to drive more international bookings through their hotels’ individual websites. QR saw the need for a new, innovative technology platform that not only better optimizes global distribution channels but also delivers greater scale and operational efficiency to lower acquisition costs. In short, they were seeking a prominent technology partner that fully understood all the technological advances, myriad of options facing consumers when shopping and booking hotels and their impact on the future hotel distribution landscape.

Implementing a New Solution with Sabre Hospitality Solutions

Once thoroughly studying and evaluating their existing technology, regional market nuances and strategic objectives, Sabre Hospitality Solutions quickly applied extensive knowledge and expertise in providing QR an integrated solution built on the SynXis® Platform, implementing SynXis Central Reservations Systems (CRS) and the SynXis Booking Engine. Overall, QR and its partner hotels have recorded double-digit sales growth YoY since migrating to the new solution, with the growth of:

Greater Visibility to Travelers Worldwide

After assessing several potential hotel technology partners and their capabilities, one of the reasons QR selected Sabre’s technology was the CRS provided greater reach worldwide to online travel markets while taking into consideration a wide variety of international guest segments and their booking behavior. With unmatched global distribution access to over 400 online channels and unsurpassed GDS/IDS connectivity, SynXis Central Reservations was perfectly suited to handle their fast-paced international online sales segment requirements. In addition to direct channels, SynXis Central Reservations delivers rates and inventory to all major GDS systems, as well as online travel agencies through direct connections and switch partners. It seamlessly links directly to the property management systems (PMS) to Sabre’s online sales system, distributing QR’s hotel properties’ rates and inventory to all major OTAs as well as many local, regional and niche market sites. Reservations from all sales channels were also automatically loaded into the PMS for greater operational efficiency, making manual processing a thing of the past.

The biggest benefit seen after implementing SynXis Central Reservations

The QR team experienced hardly any downtime, greater system reliability, and real-time connectivity, reducing data parity across systems. All of which lead to increased growth in ADR, occupancy, and additional sales outside their established markets.

SynXis Booking Engine Delivers Modern User Experience Returning an Uplift in Online Bookings

In order to convert more global web browsers into online bookings, QR also switched their existing booking engine over to the SynXis Booking Engine. QR and its hoteliers wanted a booking engine that provided greater flexibility and ability to scale up to meet wide-reaching demand. The booking engine delivered a number of key benefits impacting conversions: Quick Pricing Updates Vying for attention in a highly dynamic, crowded global travel space, the ability to deliver promotional codes unique to each guest or campaign allowed the QR team to swiftly execute their distribution strategy and adjust to changing market demands. Self-Customization The designer tool enabled each hotel property to quickly build and edit the booking engine in real-time, plus add multi-lingual content and pictures to lure a greater number of online shoppers. Streamlined Booking Path The booking engine seamlessly integrated with hotel properties’ websites for a frictionless booking experience to significantly drive direct sales. Modern, Responsive User Interface (UI) A mobile-friendly, intuitive design delivered a consistent experience across all devices, leading to fewer abandon shops online. Once the implementation of the SynXis Booking Engine was completed, QR noticed a significant growth in bookings as a direct result of having a responsive, streamlined booking process that aligned seamlessly to their overall distribution strategy.

Overall, the SynXis Booking Engine generated a high double digit-increase YoY in room nights for all 280 hotel properties.

Looking to Optimize Your Distribution Channels and Drive More Bookings?

Sabre Hospitality Solutions is ready to help you improve your distribution journey by providing an integrated solution optimized across all channels and guest touchpoints — delivering the increased bookings every hotel in today’s highly competitive travel landscape aspires to obtain. In fact, 40% of the world’s leading hotel brands rely on our technology and industry expertise to answer their business objectives. Our solutions can be found in over 39,000 hotel properties managed around the world, producing 51.1 million total bookings and $25.2 billion in total room sales for a ~15% annual growth rate. Contact us to learn how we can optimize your distribution channel and increase conversions for your hotel or chain.