How do travel agents check hotel availabilities?
I know that travel agents have various IATA systems (SABRE used to be one of them) for checking airline flight availability.
But how about hotels?
I mean if I tell my travel agent I want to stay in a one bedroom room in
City X between dates Y and Z, how does the travel agent find out what is available?
Is there something similar to the airline reservation system, only for hotels?
What is it called?
May 24th, 2010 at 9:19 pm
**picks up phone**
Hello do you have availabilty?
Yes? oh good thank you
May 24th, 2010 at 10:08 pm
Its called a computer. Yes its like an airline reservation system
May 24th, 2010 at 10:25 pm
there lots of websites for checking this out
including the hotel group’s own website
May 24th, 2010 at 10:39 pm
It depends on the agent. Some will fax, call or email the hotel they have contracts with to check availability. Other companies – the larger ones – will have a pre-bought or pre-assigned quota of rooms from the hotels they have contracts with and will usually have an internal computer system similar to Sabre to check the availability of their quota. When I was an agent, we used to make the bookings by fax and email as we specialised in independent travel rather than package holidays. Phone calls don’t really cut it as you need to receive confirmation in writing. Now, some hotels have online booking systems that allow registered agents to access a special agents’ area and book that way – technology is a wonderful thing.
May 24th, 2010 at 11:18 pm
Hotels are available through the major airline reservation systems. In the US, they are Sabre, Apollo, and Worldspan. Amadeus is also used but is much less common. In the pre-Internet days, that’s how we did most hotel reservations.
Some reservations are made by phone and fax because the airline systems don’t always have last-room availability. Some agents also use the Internet.
Some third-party websites, such as Expedia and Hotels.com, have special pricing arrangements with selected hotels. The fares and inventory for these are kept in an internal database or through a direct link to the hotel company’s computer system. However, the non-special rate hotels are booked through the airline systems.
The major airline systems also have car rental and train information.