Unleash your inventory to content creators

Intended audience: Suppliers / Properties

It’s time to take the final step in “leveling up your sales game”. In this post, we will talk about how to take advantage of selling your inventory through all our sales channels, at the same time, through a simple and user friendly interface.

Seven years ago, we started the 0% commission OTA Traveliko. It was our way of trying to level the playing field for our hotel partners. Any booking made through Traveliko would let you keep all the money for that booking. Three years ago, we launched a fully featured, low-cost, embeddable, booking engine for hotels to give you another way to get cheap bookings and in-depth analytics without travelers ever leaving your brand.com site.

We have come a long way since then and have been busy creating the next big thing in travel. We are excited to tell you all about what we have been working on today.

Free your inventory

Apart from cost savings, the goal for us has always been to give you access to a different kind of audience. One that is passionate about traveling and is looking for other reasons [than price] to visit your property. We never let you game placement on Traveliko.com with commissions. Instead, we featured you first, for free, if you scored well in one of our categories such as “experiences” or “eco-friendly”. If you visit Traveliko.com right now, you can see these categories in action.

By you differentiating your property you reach different audiences and you gain a competitive advantage in that market.

Micro OTAs

If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there to hear it…

Traveliko.com was an ambitious project created by hoteliers and people who wanted to give back control over inventory and price to hotels and make them earn a fair set of wages. Competing with Expedia and Booking.com on their own playing field proved hard. We didn’t want to be part of the Google AdWords war that was going on between OTAs either. We also knew it would only make Google stronger.

Where do you go when looking for your next vacation? If you are anything like most travelers, you head on over to Instagram or look for blogs from other passionate travelers who have already been to the destination you are thinking about. You look at their videos and pictures and decide “This is where I want to go!”. What if these bloggers and IG influencers could connect you with exactly the deal you are looking for right then and there? Not just the cheapest / best place to stay but the best experience and stay the influencer can recommend … because they already lived it!

This is what we’ve done. We’ve bypassed Google AdWords and the OTA rat-race to sell the cheapest most generic room available and instead chose to partner up with travel bloggers, influencers and new travel tech startups looking to earn a small commission on doing what they already love doing. We gave them all the tools they need to link directly to deals, embed the deal directly into their blog or use our APIs for more sophisticated uses. We have all the widgets they need to make them look like a proper OTA. You have full control over price, inventory, promotions and commission to each seller. Think of this as the most advanced travel affiliate program ever made and we are the clearing house. You get to track the impact of each of your sellers. Not only that, you can track how other properties and sellers are doing so you can price yourself accordingly and attract more sellers to you.

Did you know there are 100+ million travel blogs out there? That’s why we want your profile to look great so sellers choose to feature your property in their next blog post or video. Did you also know you can add videos to your profile? Now would be a good time to think about that.

Charges / Cancellations / Disbursements

“Wait… If you now have an army of passionate people selling for you, how will you and they all get paid?”

That’s why we created TripPay.io Payments have always been a headache in the travel space. Both paying and getting paid has, until now, been costly and time consuming. A single hotel listed on 10 different OTAs, all with different payment models, quickly turns into an accounting nightmare.

To solve those problems and with the help of some very banking-savvy fintech partners, we have created the very first intelligent global bank for the travel industry. All the funds from bookings that go through our platform go into your TripPay.io account. Funds are released once the guest checks out and the commission and other fees are automatically deducted. You choose when you want to withdraw the funds from TripPay to your own local bank account. Disbursements can be automated to save even more time. You also enjoy low credit card fees and bank transfer fees that get lower with time as the platform grows and volume increases. Cancellations and refunds are handled by TripPay.

Finally, payments between TripPay accounts are free! This means you can pay other suppliers at no cost to you if you both have a TripPay bank account. Sellers can also choose to pay for their next trip with funds from their TripPay account. You should be telling all your OTA partners to use TripPay. That way, all the money from all your bookings, across all your OTAs, flow directly into your TripPay account. A singular, simple, way to get paid as a hotel!

Example

Nancy Brew is an illustrious influencer and has a million followers on Instagram. Her focus is on “green living” and she is lovingly considered the “Green Queen” among her audience. Nancy also knows how to monetize herself and already has several sponsors that help pay for her daily videos. When Nancy discovers wink.travel, she gets super excited. She’s always wanted to feature the best eco-friendly hotels on her IG account and even has some videos from hotels she stayed at in the past.

She creates her account on our Seller Portal and calls it “greenqueen” and starts to look for inventory to feature. She finds a hotel she likes. It has great pictures, a lot of other things to offer and some great promotions she can offer her audience. For every booking she helps facilitate, the hotel will give her 10% commission or another commission level they have agreed on.

She spends the next three weeks promotion the hotel on Instagram and racks up 20 bookings. She upsells the hotel with an available package deal and 50% of the bookers choose the more expensive package option. After one moth of work, she made the hotel $3000 and walked away with $300. The hotel likes her work and chooses to give upgrade her commission to 12% and give her some other more lucrative exclusive upsells. Nancy runs the numbers and realizes that if she does this with 20 different hotels at 10 different destinations she could be earning more than $6000 / month. Her niche audience trusts her and enjoy knowing her for her special deals they receive from the hotels.

Both Nancy and the hotels withdraw money automatically from TripPay. They can do as many withdrawals as they want every month without any extra fees.

Next steps

First thing for you to do is to make sure you profile with us sparkles. We will start with onboarding 300 000 influencers and bloggers who will get their first attempt at selling hotel inventory. This is all happening very soon so don’t miss out on the “first mover” opportunity. We have worked hard at creating a platform that meets the needs of travel savvy hotels and travelers alike.

Hope you liked it.