Amadeus Unveils HRS Hotel Agreement

Hotel sales will get a boost from Amadeus and HRS, the hotel portal, who are reporting a strategic alliance to distribute HRS’ 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, Amadeus said. The service will be available by the second quarter of 2012 to corporations and travel agencies.

The strategic partnership, Amadeus said, will seamlessly integrate HRS’ database of 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 offers business travelers a 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.

The integration of HRS hotel offers to Amadeus will eliminate labor-intensive, hotel shopping and servicing by bookers, who typically compare rates for the same hotel across multiple channels before booking. It also brings an array of highly-demanded independent hotels to the GDS environment for the first time.

“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," said Tobias Ragge, CEO, HRS.

"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 percent 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," Ragge said.

Amadeus said it has already started the integration of HRS’s content into its distribution system. 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 easily from a single screen and with the highest level of mid- and back office integration, Amadeus said.

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