Pegasus Solutions are offering RAVE, its exclusive Rate and Availability Engine, to hotels to help manage the high volume of shopping queries generated daily from travel agents, travel distributors and travel Web sites.Dallas-based Pegasus is a global leader in providing technology and services to hotels and travel distributors.
RAVE, which was developed by Pegasus to enable its own CRSs to cope with the increasing number of shopping inquiries, is the only system available that can help hotels deal with the ever-increasing number of queries that are threatening to overwhelm hotel CRSs.
“CRSs are being inundated with rate and availability inquiries as consumers and travel agents shop for just the right room at just the right price,” Bob Boles, Pegasus chief operating officer, noted. “With Next Generation Seamless (NGS) technology giving travel agents direct access to hotel CRSs and online travel sites making it easy for consumers to comparison shop, reservation systems that were designed for a look-to-book ratio of four queries to one booking are now faced with ratios in the thousands-to-one range. And the ratio is increasing.”
Although some hotels are responding by adding additional processing capacity, “they can’t just keep adding servers to solve the problem,” Bole noted. “Now, they can take advantage of RAVE, which processed 78 million shopping transactions in January 2006 for hotels using our CRS, to alleviate the stress on their CRSs.”
The company said it would release specifications in April for an OTA (Open Travel Alliance) compliant interface into RAVE so that hoteliers can make the necessary preparations to start the implementation process with RAVE in the 3Q this year.
“RAVE is definitely an added value to Rezview customers,” said Riko van Santen, director of distribution and information technology for the Golden Tulip Hospitality Group. “The explosive growth in NGS connectivity on GDS, the growing number of 3rd party sites, Web rate crawlers and meta search engines would all add substantial burden to a CRS environment if not for RAVE.”
RAVE stores and maintains a property’s rate and availability data taking the additional processing burden generated by the Global Distribution System (GDS) and online travel sites off the central reservation system. The hotel’s rate and availability information is updated within RAVE on an ongoing basis to ensure that the information is in sync with the hotel’s CRS. This process enables travel agents and online consumers to identify hotels that meet their travel needs more quickly and more efficiently, knowing that the information they see while shopping will not change as the booking process continues.
“RAVE gives hotels the opportunity to be represented across multiple distribution channels,” explained Boles, “while keeping its CRS from being overwhelmed by the ever-increasing volume of shopping requests.”
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