THE HOTEL MATCHMAKER
Hotel attachment rates up 20 percent? That's what Bashvitz says some of his clients realize after integrating with his database of 50 million reviews and 200 million travel sentiments that allow Olset to match hotel offerings to business traveler expecations.
“The only solution [travelers] have is to sit there and read [hotel] reviews for hours,” said Olset founder and CEO Gadi Bashvitz. Last year, Olset’s effort to change that, by automating search and matching hotel results to travelers, caught on with a few corporate travel players, he said, including such clients as Adelman Travel, Amadeus and BCD Travel. It also inspired imitation. Travel management company Short’s Travel, for example, launched its FindIt system for hotel shopping with some Olset-like features.
“When we think about a purchasing decision, the data about hotels today is qualitative,” he said. Does the hotel have a pool, Wi-Fi, a gym? “That’s not what we care about. What we care about is: Can I actually swim in that pool? Is the Wi-Fi good? Can I work out in that gym? What’s the quality of those features?”
At Olset’s core is a database that features 50 million traveler reviews and some 200 million categorized traveler sentiments. The company culls data from TripAdvisor reviews, Facebook posts and other sources; uses natural language processing and sentiment analysis; and “[attaches] that data back to a set of more than 500,000 hotels globally,” said Bashvitz. “Instead of just getting a random list of hotels, which is what happens now, you get a very personalized list of results. We give the tools to the traveler to help them understand exactly why these hotels are recommended to them.”
So, why should travel managers care about personalization? “A lot of reasons,” said Bashvitz. “One thing we’re seeing is the demand from TMCs and travel managers to increase the hotel attachment rate.” Better hotel matches, Bashvitz reasons, mean more bookings in corporate channels. He even claimed some clients’ hotel attachment rates improved by 20 percentage points.