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Ana Rodriguez
Nowadays the tourists prefer to organize their vacations on their own to reduced the prices
"30 % of the purchases made by tourists in 2004 include some product of packaging". The 79 % of these travellers elaborated by itself their package, according to Christine Brosnahan, vice-president of Distribution and Reserve Services Department of the Carlson Hotels Worldwide, said in the conference of the Hotels Electronic Distribution Network Association (HEDNA) celebrated in Barcelona from the 8 to the 10 of May.
The tendency for leisure tourists is to organize vacations their own with "Dynamic Packaging", contracting different suppliers as the hotel, the airplane ticket and the car rental.
This tendency is favoured by the existence of a "extensive discounted price offers" in the tourist market, circumstance that " reduces the brand importance", in favour of "the best price", as it affirmed Henry h. Harteveldt, vice-president of Forrester Research.
David V. Jones, representative of Amadeus Global Travel Distribution, centred its intervention in the "Challenge of the Multi-channel ", when considering that the wide existence of direct channels (hotel websites, Central Booking Departments, or Call Centre) and indirect (On Line Travel agencies, Tour operators, traditional travel agencies, etc) requires a unification of prices and channels, "because although 43% of the hotels assure that they offer the lowest price, big variations are appraised among them" (Source: Global Distribution Hotel).
As actions to resolve the "distortion " that lives between the offers, Jones proposes "to make available the prices and availability in real time for the client ", besides "to contribute customized solutions to cover the necessities of each channel".
Personalization
Besides, the person in charge of Amadeus said that the 39% of the business travellers from US "were not recognised as frequent customers by their preferred hotel". In this way, the 16% of them, who were recognised like frequent customers by their hotel, did not receive special offers (Survey by Accenture). Harteveldt shared the need of initiating some personalized activities depending on the tourist features, due to "there are significant differences depending on the country, language or age of the customer".
The technology investment is one of the facts which is recognized like an essential requirement to "assume new trends", said the Sabre Labs director, Tony Brice. On the other hand, Henry h. Harteveldt emphasized the growing of the metasearch engines, where Google and Yahoo dominate their usage. This situation directs the enterprises to get partnership for distributed "vertical search", Brice declared.
HEDNA, a institution were executives and directors from the 200 most influential businesses in the sector of the distribution of hotels participate, pursues to increase the incomes derived from the electronic hotel distribution which makes it necessary to optimize and get to know the use of the new technologies.
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