The only filter you need

This blog is part four of our miniseries, focused on helping hoteliers win bookings and maximize revenue throughout recovery. 

Safety is of paramount importance to travelers right now, and hoteliers should be mindful that this brings a new challenge for travel agents. During the search and booking process, they now need to be able to find your safety information and communicate it back to the traveler. Unfortunately, this often means using multiple sources outside their workflow, which is inefficient and frustrating — especially for those working with reduced resources.

At the same time, hotels are equally looking for ways to communicate what they are doing to the agents that are booking these trips. To make matters more complicated, restrictions, policies, and safety measures can vary significantly by property location, type, and more.

Travelport has been looking for ways to make communication between hotels and agents easier, and more efficient for everyone. That’s why we’re rolling out a new feature on our platform: our new Stay Safe searchable amenity.

What is Stay Safe?

Since the pandemic hit earlier this year, several trade and government bodies, including the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC) and the World Health Organization (WHO) have issued guidelines to support recovery in the hotel sector. These are designed to define what the necessary health and safety attributes are, and to enable hoteliers to communicate them in a consistent way. These initiatives focus on enhanced hotel cleaning practices, social interactions, and workplace protocols to meet the new challenges and expectations for health and safety.

Travelport has added our Stay Safe amenity onto our platform to allow agents to quickly and easily filter results based on hotels or chains who have signed up to the initiative.

For agents

The filter is designed to give travelers and agencies alike confidence that appropriate safety measures have been taken at a hotel property. This will be available to Desktop & API points of sale. Smartpoint Desktop Agencies will be able to search/filter hotel results for Stay Safe hotels using entry /F-SAF

This will benefit agencies greatly by reducing the need to consult multiple sources for advice on safety measures at the point of sale. For agencies that have reduced headcount, or are operating with limited resources in particular, being able to stay within their primary workflow is a huge advantage.

For Hotels

Hotels will welcome this development as it provides them with a consistent and widely recognized industry standard to adhere to. It’s also another opportunity to communicate with agents at the point of booking. You can further enhance your message via banner ads and sign-on messages within the booking platform to help you to reach agents and keep them up to date on your latest safety news, offers, and changes.

Find out more

This concludes the last of our blog miniseries — I hope you have found it useful.

The key takeaway for hoteliers is that you have a range of measures, tools, and options available that can help give travelers the confidence to book. From safety measures to flexible policies, different rates, and promotions — all of this can help accelerate your recovery journey.  Communication is key, and there are so many ways that you can use our platform to improve your reach and get your messages out there.

As always, we’re on hand to help you as you get back to business, so please reach out to us for more information on anything covered in this miniseries that you’d like to know more about.