It does not matter if you have one or a hundred integrations in your platform. There is always one thing that’s at the top of your concerns: Mapping.
Be it, destination mapping, properties, rooms, categories, facilities, amenities, chains… there is so much mapping to do, and so little time.
Providers will insist, less than a weekly update of the content and you’re prone to miss the best deals.
Your team will ask sincerely, if we are doing mapping, who is taking care of the customers?
Our stand on the issue is simple, your platform and your provider must work together and leave that issue out of your picture.
Having that in mind, at the beginning of 2016 we started a program called “Certified Mapping”, our idea is that providing the right tools to each party, everybody will benefit.
We started with something very simple… an XML or JSON feed where each content provider could check their products and destinations mapping. Needless to say there were some companies truly eager to participate and some others that weren’t that much!
In our second stage of “Certified Mapping”, we asked providers what information could help them know how our connectivity was working. Then we developed a set of statistics that they can access and review with real-time data.
Later on we identified the “one” issue that‘s ’the main caveat in the relationship between our customers and the content providers: when a booking is missing on one end, due to timeouts or connectivity errors. The third tool to “Certified Mapping” was then created: “ABR”, Automatic Bookings reconciliation, checks with each provider to proactively detect bookings that are missing and alerts our customer to take the proper actions.
If a content provider want’s to be Tier 1 in our platform, it has to comply with the “Certified Mapping” initiative; that way when our customers connect them to their platform, it’s certain the content will be periodically checked, and if something fails, that they’ll be covered.