What is a non-GDS hotel really?

I did a presentation of Hotelzon to a prospect the other day. One of the questions they had was: what is a non-GDS hotel actually? It is a good question especially since we talk about our non-GDS hotel content when we present Hotelzon. It is simply a hotel that you cannot book in the GDS systems.

The fact is that a lot of hotels cannot afford to be present in the GDS. The Global Distribution Systems, created by the airlines, are very expensive and you need to have fair amount of bookings to compensate for the high fixed and variable costs that comes from them. If you have a smaller hotel or a hotel located in a smaller town you may not be able to accept these costs and look for alternative sales channels.

Some hotels sell their rooms to the big online travel agencies but their margin is very high and more and more of the hotels are looking at alternative ways of selling their rooms. The ideal channel for a hotel is one with low cost offering the rooms to different customer segments than what they currently have.

Hotelzon is a different channel in the sense that we work mainly with corporate customers, from small to large, and offer them exclusive hotel content. How do we do that? By blending bigger hotels and chains that you can also find in the GDS with smaller hotels located in smaller cities which you will never find in the GDS. As an example, we have almost 800 hotels in Sweden while the GDS have approximately 450!

We can also make a hotel available for bookings in Hotelzon in 24 hours! Our customers really appreciate the possibilities that this offers to them. They can book hotels for a much lower cost than if they were to use a travel agent booking in GDS.

So using the term “non-GDS hotel” is not wrong, it only describes an exclusive opportunity for our customers.

Keep on booking these exclusive hotels!