How reducing API integrations improves your connectivity
Compounded costs: Are individual API integrations hurting your bottom line?
In the online travel world there are two integral players: suppliers and distributors. They rely on APIs to communicate inventory, exchange data, and run their businesses. Without suppliers, distributors cannot populate their platforms with inventory and without distributors, suppliers would struggle to maintain the sales volumes needed to stay afloat.
APIs are an essential method for transferring data that enables distributors and suppliers to work together in a seamless and efficient manner. In order to access a supplier's inventory, distributors must integrate with each supplier's individual API. This means that for a distributor to work with multiple suppliers, as most do, several integrations are required.
The time required for integrations carries substantial operational expenditures and often takes weeks or even months to be implemented correctly. Steep financial and technical ramifications can result from this standard practice, but new developments in travel tech offer a solution to mitigate these difficulties.
How much are supplier integrations costing you?
Integrating just one API takes between 6 to 8 weeks on average, and requires a considerable amount of manpower: one to three developers, QA, and debugging teams. This can become an extremely costly and time consuming process. The prolonged integration period also results in a delay in time to market, creating a window of lost sales. An additional source of lost income is the inability to exploit the preferred rates commonly afforded by suppliers within the first 60 to 90 days of a contract.
The impacts of an outdated technological standard
In addition to the financial implications mentioned, there are several technical hurdles derived from connectivity issues that can also result in revenue loss. These encompass search result speed, breakage points and conflicts between APIs, all of which impact a distributor's ability to function at their best.
The time it takes to query results is only as fast as the slowest supplier in a distributor's system. Another speed reducing factor stems from the amount of search results a distributor chooses to display to its' customer. A large quantity of results may mean more and better booking options for the user, but it comes at the cost of a long query time. At the end of the day, this may lead to a lost customer. The distributor must make the business decision of whether it is more important to have a higher volume or faster speed of search results.
Throughout the distribution chain, there are potential points where connectivity errors may arise as a result of hardware, software, or network errors. These may be referred to as breakage points, and can lead to booking failures and sold-outs. An additional layer that impacts speed and impairs customer experience, breakage points are potential sources for errors that drive down conversions.
These various connectivity issues are more likely to occur when multiple APIs have to work together and conflict with each other. They drastically reduce the quality of service distributors can provide, decreasing customer retention and damaging sales. Decrease in customer retention is particularly problematic in an industry where acquisition is the greatest expense and a lost customer is likely lost for life.
The industry is growing and every hour wasted is money lost. Excessive time spent on supplier integrations is hurting distributors.They are paying the price many times over for those integrations, in the form of operational expenses, longer time to market and compounded technical difficulties which all affect their bottom line.
How are things changing?
So what can be done to diminish these problems? One solution would be to reduce the number of integrations needed. As challenging as this is, platforms have recently emerged that have succeeded in conquering this problem by incorporating multiple suppliers through a single API.
By eliminating the dependency on multiple APIs, errors stemming from conflicting APIs can now become a thing of the past. A single API can process all of the information in a standardized way, which leads to unmatched result accuracy. Additionally, search times are drastically reduced as processing of queries prior to display is no longer necessary. This type of solution allows distributors to gain both speed and volume of results, without compromising. This leads to a drastic reduction in booking failures, improvements to the user experience, higher retention rates, and lower look-to-books.
One of these solutions is Gimmonix's Travolutionary API, positioning itself as the clear leader of the pack. A cloud based API, it enables users to integrate with over 80 suppliers through a single integration, while automating processes and standardizing information provided by suppliers. OTAs can, for example, automate search preferences to suit their target audience, while the API collects valuable data providing them with deeper insights and analytics about customer booking behavior.
Between the financial costs of individual supplier integrations and API connectivity issues, the potential these multi-supplier platforms pose for the industry makes the next step for any distributor very clear. Automation and aggregation frees up vital resources while providing far more accurate results than was ever possible, at a faster rate than previously imagined.
To learn more, feel free to get in touch, [email protected], or visit our website.
Gimmonix is a technology company that helps travel businesses increase their revenue and boost efficiency through automated mapping technology, API connectivity, and profit optimization tools. Gimmonix pushes the limits of technology to help travel businesses minimize waste and maximize performance with its cutting-edge, cloud-based products.
