Marriott International has announced that it has established a partnership with the metasearch engine website, DerbySoft.
It is the largest company to have worked with DerbySoft, which is based in Dallas, Texas, and Shanghai, China, providing technology services to eight of the ten largest hotel companies in the world, along with with many of the world’s largest online travel agencies (OTAs) and metasearch sites.
Other names include Priceline’s Kayak; RoomKey; Expedia’s Trivago, and Qunar, a metasearch site whose majority stake is owned by Baidu, China’s largest search engine.
Travel metasearch sites have become increasingly popular in recent years, due to a demand from travelers for an opportunity to compare different travel options quickly and easily, which many are more than capable of meeting due to their ability to provide online listings from hotel suppliers such as hotel companies, central reservations system (CRS) providers, and OTAs.
There are more companies that have come to the conclusion that consumer searches can often result in huge volumes of requests for rates and availability data, placing a great deal of strain on computer systems.
Marriott International is therefore looking to buffer its CRS from large amounts of data requests from multiple search engines, a task that is set to be made easier with DerbySoft’s connectivity and caching service and will also allow Marriott to gain more direct bookings.
The DerbySoft proprietary smart cache works by analyzing past booking patterns and changes in rates, before using that information to examine shopping message results in order establish how often it needs to question hotel customers’ CRSs for rate and availability updates.
For example, if the 80 percent of the CRS queries suggest that a hotel rate has not changed, DerbySoft’s software will automatically adjust the its schedule to send fewer query messages for that hotel for that specific period.
In the case of Marriott International, which often sees a great level of strain placed on its CRS, such a system could minimize the volumes of traffic during peak hours.