Internet Distribution Systems are made up of a group of on-line travel sites where individuals or travel companies may make travel related reservations such as hotel bookings.
There are approximately 1900 travel sites and growing, with a few examples of well known travel sites being Hotels.com and Travelocity.
A hotel would generally have a merchant contract setup with specific travel sites and have their inventory available through their GDS/IDS service.
There are travel services that offer a direct link between the property management system and the travel site providing the property management system vendor provides the interface to do so.
Otherwise hotel room inventory may be managed by one of the two following methods.
- Manually by the hotel where they update their inventory using an extranet and typically login to the extranet via the Internet.
- Automatically using an interface linking the property management system and the Global Distribution Provider. Not all property management systems provide this interface, however it is becoming more common. Full automation of the procedure is available with a 2 way interface.
Some Property Management Systems vendors provide a 2 way interface that will send up room inventory information to the IDS channels and receive reservations seamlessly from the IDS booking channels. These reservations will transfer directly into the Property Management System.
Other Property Management System vendors are only able to provide a 1 way interface that will only facilitate the transfer of the reservations from the IDS channels into the Property Management System, however the inventory information is not transferred, this would need to managed manually within an extranet.
Managing room inventory manually using an extranet is a very time consuming way to manage inventory. If your property management system vendor offers a GDS/IDS interface, the cost associated with setup and implementation will typically out weigh the labour resources used to update an extranet over time.
Please note that IDS channels are closely related to GDS services and typically (but not always) use the GDS interface as the conduit.
Please read the article relating to Global Distribution Services (GDS) for more information.
property management system evaluation
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