Dasun Pubudumal, a software engineer at travel technology supplier CodeGen explains the essential principles behind de-duping hotel supply in travel’s mixed and varied supply chain
For tour operators that adopt a multi-supplier strategy for sourcing rooms, data management is still a major challenge.This approach can cause duplication as the same accommodation is returned from direct sources, bed-banks and hotel switches in a single search.Robust reconciliation and discrepancy detection is required to prevent miss-allocation which can have financial implications.
The hotel supply chain is varied and complex. Tour operators may have their own paper contracts loaded into a reservation system but may also source rates for the same hotel via third party API integrations to that reservation system with Expedia or Hotelbeds for instance. When data is fed into a system from multiple sources, it’s essential to figure out where there are duplicates. In most cases, there is no magic ID for properties to determine whether two properties are the same.