3/30/2010 1:45 AM

GDS Hotel Content

One of the biggest hurdles to overcome when using GDS's to sell hotel inventory is content. Unfortunately the GDS's have a warped pass through procedure where all the content is actually just forwarded by the hotels data entry folks into the GDS which in turn gets spat out to the front end UI of countless booking engines. Issues such as bad grammar, unpunctuated text and illegal characters are common occurances across the majority of hotels in the GDS's.

The task at hand is to make GDS data presentable to your end consumer. How is this achieved easily when all data elements are free text with no particular structure? How are you parse a telephone number when it can come in many unpredictable formats? Are we simply forced to guess the number for formats one can adopt or is there a better way to handle content? For years the GDS's have been proclaiming that they are working on strategies to correct the problem.

Currently there are companies offering superior hotel content. Such companies claim to have content for all hotels in the main GDS systems, and guarantee accuracy. Indeed there are companies that will charge $4.00 per hotel for content, but does this serve the masses?