The biggest China PMS vender

In 2008, China ADS/IDS market share drops by month, but GDS market share increases step by step, the hotel online direct sales shows promising increase as well. The hotel e-marketing has moved to a multi-dimensional development phase. In order to capture the opportunity, Zhejiang Province Hotel Association held provincial wide e-marketing training session at Hangzhou from Aug 12-14, 2008. The training helps Zhejiang province hotels understand e-marketing, and hence to develop wide range of marketing channels. As the third generation distribution technology promoter, Shiji CHINAonline (www.chinaonline.net.cn) gains widely industry recognition through its unique advanced distribution technology. Perceiving its industry uniqueness, Zhejiang province hotel association invited CHINAonline to participate in this training to provide distribution technology development analysis and have in-depth discussion with training parites over current China hotel distribution situation and future development trends. CHINAonline General Manager Mr, Cai Yongyuan made in-depth presentations about the development of global distribution technology, 360 degrees analysis of the typical models, technology realization methods and typical clients for these different distribution development phases: PMS(Property Management System hotel front desk management system), CRS(Central Reservation System), GDS(Global Distribution System), ADS/IDS(Internet Distribution System) and Switch (Hotel two-way direct connection to clients). Traditional hotel distribution all relies on offline methods (offline, the counterpart is online), mainly includes travel agencies and other agencies. This is still quite popular in China, especially for second line and under cities, most distribution sources are provided through travel agencies. Comparably, the global distribution, even through agencies, is mainly performed online. The first generation distribution had no specialized distribution technology tool to support, mainly relies on PMS to manage the distribution channels, including FIT and group reservations and so on. China PMS suppliers include Beijing Zhongchang Shiji Information Technology Limted Co. (www.shijinet.com.cn , Shenzhen Stock Exchange A share 002153) providing Fidelio, Opera brands and its subsidiary Hangzhou West Lake Software Technology Limited Co. providing Foxhis brand, Talent, China Soft, Qianlima and so on. Shiji Information has more than 60% market share in high tier hotels market, and has up to 95% market share for 5-star hotels. China CRS suppliers include Shiji Information subsidiaries - West Lake software and CHINAonline, China Soft and so on. Shiji Information has more than 50% market share. When Hotel industry steps to Chain operation, the emerging of CRS has enabled lots of single hotels to operate towards centralized operation, to move from single operation towards centralized client management, centralized marketing management and at the same time to better support distribution development to form comprehensive marketing. Following the trends, GDS and ADS/IDS distribution appears, and gradually becomes the main stream to have quite large market share. Different from the first generation distribution: the second generation hotel distribution fully relies on technology creation to evolve. Using its powerful B2B platform, GDS enables hotels to sale to several hundred thousands agencies and charge transaction fee and system usage fee. Taking advantage of Internet, ADS/IDS promotes hotel products to end customer (B2C mode) effectively, and charges hotel commissioning fee based on end customer reservations. Different from global trends: China has the ADS/IDS at first – well-known Ctrip and Elong, and until recent year, GDS type company emerged – like Travelsky and so on. For both ADS/IDS and GDS mode, most companies charge commissioning fee instead of abroad common practice - GDS charges transaction fee and system usages fee. Along with China market dramatically increase and oversea market increase, ADS/IDS in China is experience severe competition. Travel agencies (Mango, CYTS) and Telecoms (118114/12580/116114/China Unicom) are the most prominent competitors. Strong invasion of oversea competitors gradually makes many hotels to accept these GDS companies running on transaction fee and usage fee charge. We believe through several years market incubation, several representative GDS companies will emerge in China, and the second generation distribution will turn to mature. For China market, the third generation hotel distribution Switch mode must be less known. This is because such type of companies is quite rare in the world and the threshold for this type is very high. Among them, Pegasus is one of the best. The third generation hotel distribution technology more tends to be pure technology service, and has less involvement in business operation. The principle is to combine hotel PMS, CRS to have standard and integrated interfaces to directly connect to all distribution systems (GDS, ADS/IDS, TMC and so on). By doing this, it can enable full automatic processing, such as hotel price change, real-time room availability, reservation real-time confirmation and so on. This kind of technology requires the company having its PMS and CRS widely used by lots of clients, and this makes it unreachable for most of companies. Pegasus has operated globally for many years, and has become the major player in hotel distribution system. Most of hotels and channels have quite close cooperation with it. Comparably, in China, only Shiji Information has large PMS and CRS customer bases, and Shiji Information is trying to use it advantage over this to promote the third generation hotel distribution technology through its subsidiary CHINAonline. CHINAonline is now the only Switch company to provide mature third generation hotel distribution technology. Currently in China, there are almost one thousand hotel PMSs or hotel chain CRSs are connected to China top ADS/IDS and worldwide top TMC, IDS/ADS to have automatic business cooperation through CHINAonline’s Switch mode, and this is being widely recognized. After usage, many clients praised this mode to be an extraordinary experience which they have never had. Even though the preparation is quite complex, the operation is quite simple after fully functional. The previous complex price change, room availability check, tedious reservation processing, low efficiency customer stay history and other issues are all solved easily without manually interruption, which makes the business operation not only flexible and easy but also accurate and high efficient. After almost two hours discussion, CHINAonline General Manager – Mr. Cai Yongyuan described the several main characters of China hotel distribution in a comprehensive way: the prosperousness of ADS/IDS, the maturity of GDS, the growth of Switch, the emerging of hotel e-marketing. These several modes will lead the industry to have dramatic revolution in the coming 2 years. The market players must pay high attention to the trends and follow up it to take preemptive opportunities in the future severe competition to increase profits. In addition, Mr. Cai foresees the prosperous future of e-business in hotel industry. Comparing with abroad counterparts over 70% whose profits come from online, China market’s online business still falls a lot behind, and this leaves the great potential for e-business marketing in China. CHINAonline exclusively sponsored the diner banquet of this activity, and showed great appreciation to all PMS, CRS and CHINAonline Switch clients. CHINAonline also hopes to get continuous support from all market players, and believes the support will ensure CHINAonline grow more sustainable and rapidly.