Why a Swiss hotel group relies on NetToHotel

What led a prestigious Swiss hotel brand like Swiss Hospitality Collection to turn to NetToHotel for GDS distribution?

Perhaps the cultural affinity? Most of the establishments are in the German-speaking part of Switzerland and the uniformity with Italian culture is well known ... Or is it because the pictogram associated with the NetToHotel brand is particularly likeable?

None of this.

Swiss Hospitality Collection chose NetToHotel because it adds seriousness, fairness and transparency to its competence . Because the relationship established is one of collaboration, not simply that of service provider/user.

The common intention is that affiliated hotels produce well from the GDS channel, being able to act directly at all stages but with ready and attentive professional support.

Negotiation

The approach dates back to an ITB in Berlin, when a professional freelancer put the Swiss consultancy that follows the Swiss Hospitality Collection in touch with NetToHotel and told me: "there are chances that you guys can cooperate well". Since then, confcalls, emails and meetings have followed.

Points of contact quickly emerged as well as trust was soon established, reinforced by the field trial of a first hotel distributed by NetToHotel already in late 2016.

The requirements of the hotel group were:

• maintaining Synxis technology for existing hotels (and bringing others in by unifying processes)
• maintain XML connections to the various Channel Managers
• ensureoperational autonomy on the tool on the part of the individual hotelier
• increase the possibilities of intervention by the group's staff, both in the sales support phase and in the statistical analysis phase
• have a guarantee of data ownership
• having prompt and proactive assistance
• reasonable costs, allowing one party to provide a good service and the other to invest the right amount in a channel as important as the GDS

All topics that are already part of our service features.

NetToHotel offers the individual hotelier all those opportunities, it was easy to propose them to the group. But we wanted to do more, we invested in a German native speaker for support.

The phases of Switch

On 2 and 3 January 2018, the switch was implemented for 11 hotels, adding to the 3 pilot facilities activated during 2017.

Migrating a large number of hotels in just a few hours requires a lot of preparation, and Synxis was very cooperative, enabling us to get everything done on time. So were our colleagues at the various Channel Managers, with configuration, mapping and testing just before the holidays.

The shells were created months in advance and all the technical data sheets were loaded (rooms, descriptions, sales rules, rate plans, etc.). In the two weeks preceding the changeover, the XML links with the various Channel Managers were configured and tested.

Among the difficulties were the impossibility for hotels to access data from the past and a bit of confusion on the part of some hoteliers who were not used to such freedom of action on the GDS tool.

The future

It goes without saying that other hotels in the group will switch to distribution with NetToHotel when they are free of their current contractual obligations, as well as new members of the Swiss Hospitality Collection group, but we want every single independent hotelier to be able to work with NetToHotel and benefit from the direct telephone support (opening an online ticket is not like picking up the phone and talking to people) and all the other advantages.

If a colleague asks you how to get the most out of the GDS channel, tell him or her with confidence: "turn to NetToHotel".

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