OTA: 33 Questions to Ask Yourself When Choosing an IT Vendor

Establishing or improving operations as an Online Travel Agency (OTA) is filled with challenges and pitfalls. Ultimately, decisions must come down to choosing that which will yield the maximum return for your investment.

However, that is rarely a clear choice, instead, you can find yourself bogged down in features and functions that obscure the best choice unique to your OTA. One area that has the potential for drastically increased margins is your hotel product, it's a vertical that can work wonders, provided that it's properly optimized.

That's a path that begins with finding the best connectivity solution for your hotel inventory suppliers. There are a handful of hotel connectivity solutions out today, and they each offer their own set of features. Each feature is also executed differently, going through that list of features can be overwhelming. After all, it's a decision that you have to get right, otherwise, your hotel product can fail.

To safeguard your success with hotels, we put together a checklist of questions to keep 'top of mind' when trying to assess a solution. They're broken into three categories: Connectivity, Mapping, and Functionality.

Connectivity

Connectivity refers to all the hotel supplier-related questions you need to get answers to before moving forward. After all, it is the primary function of the service.

1. How many hotel suppliers do they currently have integrated?
2. What is their process for adding new suppliers?
3. How long does it typically take to integrate a new supplier?
4. Do they have the specific suppliers you need for your target markets?
5. What is the quality of their supplier relationships?
6. How frequently is supplier data updated?
7. What is their uptime and reliability record?
8. How do they handle supplier API changes and updates?
9. What redundancy measures do they have in place?
10. Can you easily switch between suppliers or add/remove them?
11. How do they handle rate parity across suppliers?
12. What is their supplier onboarding process like?

Mapping

Mapping is technically a drill-down of connectivity, however, it is critical and has enough questions to warrant its own category.

13. What is their approach to hotel mapping - manual, automated, or hybrid?
14. How accurate is their hotel matching across suppliers?
15. How do they handle duplicate properties?
16. What is their process for room mapping?
17. How many room attributes do they map?
18. How do they handle inconsistent room naming across suppliers?
19. What is their mapping coverage (percentage of hotels mapped)?
20. How quickly can they map new properties?
21. Do they offer mapping quality guarantees or SLAs?
22. Can you customize mapping rules for your specific needs?
23. How do they handle mapping conflicts or errors?
24. What level of granularity do they provide in room mappings?

Functionality

Functionality is for all the features, functions and services that don't fall into the primary two categories but have a significant impact on your services, costs and bottom line profits.

25. Do they play favorites with suppliers, incentivizing you to work with certain hotel suppliers over others?
26. How will working with them affect your relations with your existing suppliers, end-users and new clients?
27. Besides hotel supplier connectivity, what other types of services do they provide connectivity to?
28. What is their pricing model and how transparent is it?
29. What analytics and reporting capabilities do they offer?
30. How flexible is their API and integration options?
31. What level of technical support do they provide?
32. Do they offer business intelligence tools or insights?
33. What is their roadmap for future developments and innovations?

Conclusion

Keep this list handy when you're improving your hotel product and you won't risk missing a critical feature to your OTA's success.