All eyes are on airport, border and airline infrastructure struggling to cope with the influx of summer travellers now that tourism is on the move again.

Aviation will overcome this blip in a few months as it readjusts to a world reopened, but there’s a piece of travel’s infrastructure that deserves much more attention to make sure it’s fit for the long term: hotel distribution.

At the advent of digital hotel distribution, the companies who invented the technology that power it were protective of their intellectual property.

The network of behind-the-scenes systems is complex and major players with deep pockets installed costly commissions and mysterious algorithms that protected their position of power.

But as technology developed, the world has moved on, and this ‘digital gatekeeping’ now gets in the way.

As a result, the companies which were seen as disruptors at the end of the last century are now dominant megaliths.

A bunker mentality has set in. The digital walls that divide hotels and room sellers are only getting higher, tightly controlling their earnings, and perpetuating an infrastructure that demands that businesses go through intermediary systems – at enormous cost – rather than allowing hotels and room sellers to do business freely and affordably with each other.

We believe that new infrastructure can break down these walls, and through modern API technology, the world of hotel distribution can become truly ‘open’. The result is a marketplace that is easily, quickly and cost-effectively available to anyone.

Impala developed ‘Open Distribution’ to make it easy for any travel business to join. Hotels can quickly gain access to new markets, to attract more of the guests that work for their property.

Room sellers can access the technology and inventory to create new differentiated travel ideas in minutes.

Read the full article at Travolution